Movies that make you think

124. Russian director Andrei Zvyagintsev’s “Elena” (2011): The third riveting film from a talented filmmaker who makes any perceptive viewer sit up and enjoy layers of meaning

2012-01-25T21:47:00.000-08:00

Andrei Zvyagintsev is one of the most interesting among activefilmmakers today. He has only made three feature films. Each of those three filmsis built, to put it in literary terms, on the scale of a novella rather than anepic novel. Each film delves with aspects of family bonding—or at least thatprovides the least common factor for the tales, only to multiply and amplify onaspects of an individual’s life beyond the family, subjects often relating topsychology, politics, sociology and religion. And that is what makes anyZvyagintsev film interesting—its universality and its inward looking questions,all open ended for the viewer to ponder over after the movie gets over. And Elena is true to that spirit.

Famous Russian novels (later made into films) often had fortheir titles mere names—Anna Kareninaor Dr Zhivago. But those novels wentbeyond those ordinary names. (A few US films, such as Tony Gilroy’s Michael Clayton, also used ordinaryindividual’s names at titles of movies.) This is the case of Elena,the movie. Elena is the lead character, an ordinary individual. Yet, sherepresents much more than a simple individual. She represents a socialclass, a generation, and the mother hen of a family. She combines diametricallyopposing elements of the angelic Florence Nightingale and a cool, calculatedvillain. Like a Michael Clayton, you can spot Elenas in our society.

The basic story of Elenais of a humble matronly nurse who marries a rich man, taking care of his needsfrom hospital, where they first met during a hospitalization, to his eleganthome in the evening of his life. The obvious strand of the story is the socialdisconnect between husband and wife, even though both are content and obviouslyneed each other. The woman needs the money and social standing of her husband,and the man needs a woman for companionship and personal care and to manage hisupscale apartment. The rich man has a “hedonistic” daughter from a previousmarriage, who still loves her father in an aloof manner and lives her own lifefar from the “family”. The father, in contrast, cares for the prodigal daughterand is concerned about her future, while he is least concerned about his wife’sprogeny.

Elena has her own brood, from a previous marriage. A son, adaughter-in-law, and a grandson with limited means and ability, who seem tosurvive on Elena’s financial contributions, constitute the other branch of thefamily tree. After the initial introductions of the state of Elena's extended family, thestory of Elena the movie takes off to a higher altitude as the drama progresses fromthe preliminaries into intrigue culminating in an ending that will make anintelligent viewer ponder over the various events in the film.

To assess the film as a mere tale of two social classes inmodern-day Russia would be missing the wood for the trees. It is indeed a taleof the “invasion of the barbarians”—an original title Zvyagintsev had toyedwith using. The sharp contrast of the overhead shot of the rich old man in hisbed early in the film, with the overhead shot of Elena’s grandchild lying inthe center of an oversized bed is only one layer of the rich screenplay of Elena.

If a viewer thought the film was a tale on classinequalities in Russia, it would be relevant to hear what the director has tosay on the film. To quote Zvyagintsevfrom Elena’s press kit: “This is a dramafor today, told in a modern cinematographic language subjecting the viewer toeternal questions about life and death. A monster disguised as a saint, arepenting sinner facing her idols in a temple — how is that for an image of theApocalypse? The Devil is powerless when he stands before the face of God. Manis powerless in the face of Death. And God is powerless in the face of Man’sfreedom of choice. Humanity holds the key to the future of this trinity.”Now, this critic has always held the view that Russian directors like Tarkovsky, AndreiMikhalkov-Konchalovsky, and Zvyagintsev are deeply religious individuals(having grown up in the traditions of Russian Orthodox Church) and their cinemabetrays their theological bent even though traditional images of worship rarelyappear on the screen in their cinematic works. In Elena, there is a brief sequence of Elena praying but it is fleeting. At a critical point of the film,the train on which Elena is travelling kills a horse on the railway tracks. A horse killed in an accident might appearinsignificant to many. Not so to a Russian filmmaker like Zvyaginstsev wholoves to use Tarkovsky-like images of horses one recalls in Solyaris andAndrei Rublyev. For Zvyagintsev and for Tarkovsky, the white horse is a symbolof purity and grace. And the killing of a horse in Elena suggests the fall from grace. The context has to beunderstood by the viewer. So is the electricalpower failure or outage in Elena’s son’s apartment on Elena's second visit. In Zvyagintsev’s The Return, other Tarkovskian metaphorslike the sudden rains were brought into focus.

In Elena, theopening shot is of an apartment viewed from outside, from the perspective of atree branch. There is a long silence until it is broken by a cry of a bird, a hoodedcrow (Corvus cornix), if my knowledgeof ornithology holds good. The shot of the bird and its cry, are harbingers ofthe varied metaphors strewn around the film. A crow is never considered a good omen. When the rich man takes out hiscostly sedan to drive to go to his regular swimming pool, he has to stop his car for a stream of workers whocross the road. Any Zvyagintsev film ought to be enjoyed like solving acrossword puzzle. Every shot is loaded with a silent commentary. The obvious story line of the rich versus the poor is obvious for theless interested viewer. However, Zvyagintsev haspresented through Elena his concernfor the diminishing ethical, moral and spiritual values in of the post-glasnostRussia of today.

Zvyagintsev’s choice of subjects and the writer(s) to buildhis three films gives an insight into the man. His first film The Return wasbased on a little known Russian duo, who wrote TV scripts. Collaborating withZvyagintsev, opened up their careers to work later with the talented NikitaMikhalkov on the Oscar nominated film, 12,loosely based on The Twelve Angry Men.Zvyagintsev moved on to American writer William Saroyan for his next film The Banishment. He used the skills oftwo other lesser known Russian screenplay writers, Artom Melkumian and OlegNegin. Between the two writers and Zvyagintsev, Saroyan’s work was transformedinto a slightly different tale with so much added punch. He cleverly droppedthe Saroyan title of The Laughing Matterand called it by the loaded title TheBanishment. Zvyagintsev persisted with Negin on his third film Elena. WhatMelkumian and Negan did to reshape the Saroyan tale, is accentuated by Negan in Elena, with a host of symbols andmetaphors that transport a simple tale of a family into the world ofcontemporary politics, ethics, social changes and religion. The women characters in all the three Zvyagintsev films are interesting studies: they live to serve men. In Elena, the main female character drives the story-line, even though she lives to serve, first her husband and subsequently her son.

Zvyagintsev’s debut film The Return has all the trappings of the elements that made AndreiTarkovsky tick and the structured layers of meanings that the film offered weremindboggling. That debut won him the Golden Lion at Venice film festival and 27other awards worldwide. His second film TheBanishment won the Best Actor prize at Cannes film festival. His third workElena won him the Jury prize atCannes in the Un Certain Regardsection, the Grand Prize of the Ghent international film festival and theSilver Peacock for the Best Actress at the Indian International Film Festival,Goa.

These honors themselves indicate that Zvayagintsev is adirector who can pick good actors and derive great performances from them. Inthe first two films, he stuck with actor Konstantin Lavronenko for the mainrole. He was able to transform an actor with three low profile Russian filmsinto an internationally recognizable actor. For his second film, he chose thetalented Norwegian/Swedish actress Maria Bonnevie over Russian actresses and the lady delivered a smashing low-key performance. In Elena, a TV actress NadezhdaMarkina was catapulted into role that won her a Silver Peacock and the bestactress award at the Asian Pacific Screen awards.

Zvangintsev’s cinema cannot be appreciated sufficiently ifone does not notice his constant cinematographer Mikhail Krichman who went onto win a Golden Ossella at the Venice Film Festival for his cinematography inanother remarkable recent Russian work SilentSouls (2010). Krichman’s amazing ability to make nature and the naturalsurroundings come alive in each frame is remarkable. The combination ofZvyagintsev and Krichman is a gift for viewers, just as director Grigory Kozintsevpaired with Jonas Gritsius to give us those magnificent Shakespeare films fromRussia, Korol Lir (King Lear) and Gamlet (Hamlet).

Apart from actors and the cameraman of Zvyagintsev’s cinema,viewers have been introduced to three remarkable musicians Andrei Dergatchev inThe Return, the Estonian composerArvo Pärt in The Banishment,and now in Elena the minimalist UScomposer Philip Glass. In Elena, PhilipGlass’ music comes in stark contrast to a diagetic soundtrack, when Elena headsto the nest of her brood. Philip Glass has never been as breathtaking in cinemaas he has been in Elena and Godfrey Reggio’s Koyaanisqatsi.

And that is what makes Zvyaginstev’s cinema a rich total experience—greatthought-provoking screenplays, superb visuals, arresting performances,delightful music and a direction that leaves you clamoring for more of such films.

P.S. Elena ranks as one of the 10 best films of 2011 for the author. Zvyagintsev's The Return and The Banishment have been reviewed earlier on this blog. The Russian films Silent Souls and Korol Lir (King Lear) and the US film Michael Clayton have also been reviewed on this blog.

123. Iranian director Asghar Farhadi’s “Jodái-e Náder az Simin” (Nader and Simin: A Separation) (2011): A delightful study of gender differences and the importance of keeping the family together

2012-01-15T05:32:00.000-08:00

Iranian cinema has made impressive strides in recent decadesand Nader and Simin: A Separation isundoubtedly the crowning achievement of Iranian cinema in 2011. It is not often that any film wins three of the four top honors at a major festival such as the Berlin Film Festival 2011. Apart from the Golden Bear for the best film, Nader and Simin: A Separation won the Silver Bearsfor Best Actor and Best Actress—it only missed out on the Best Director, a redundant award after having won the Golden Bear. The many other awards the film has won include the Silver Peacock for the best director at the Indian International Film Festival held in Goa and the Golden Globe for the best foreign film. No Iranian film has received such an impressive and varied international recognition to date.

There are many reasons to admire this work of cinema. One,it is one of the few Iranian films that has enjoyed equal recognition within Iran andelsewhere. Though the film has slivers of implicit critical commentary on theconditions in Iran today, the mainstay of the film is a social commentary that couldtake place anywhere in the world. It is probably this fact that led the currentgovernment of Iran to allow this film as an official entry of Iran at theOscars 2012.

The second reason that evokes admiration is that the film isnot about a separation leading to divorce, but instead a film on how a wife,Simin, of 14 years desires to be with her husband, Nader, but emigrate from Iran and thus give a fillip to the future of their 11-year-old daughter, Termeh. Another aspect of this social value chain is the bull-headed stand of Nader, who refuses to emigratebecause of his ingrained Asian fundamental value of the son's moral responsibility to care for hisAlzheimer-stricken father in Iran. Nader’s viewpoint is the derived from the Asian value of parents giving all their efforts and savings for theiroffspring, quite in contrast to modern western values. The film thus underscores theimportance of a family, the love of a mother for her daughter, a son for hisfather, a daughter for her parents, and an economically weak husband, Hodjat, forhis wife Razieh and their daughter.

The third reason that makes the film outstanding is the rapid flow of the realisticnarrative, enabled by an ensemble cast that makes the viewer feel the events on screen couldeasily happen to the viewer as well, in any geographical context. There is not onemoment in the film when the viewer would feel bored. The amazing scriptenraptures the viewer as a thriller would while the film exudes realism that is easily identifiable and credible.

The fourth reason is that the film’s director Asghar Farhadiseems to have made his best work to date, with each film he has made beingprogressively an improvement on his previous work. This work finally catapultshim to a level where he can rub shoulders with finest of Iranian filmmakers: Mehrjui,Kiarostami, Majidi, Panahi, Naderi, the Makhmalbaf family, and Jalili. Thesuccess of this film will definitely help to bring into international limelightthe finest of Iranian cinema to audiences who are unaware of its stature.

There is no dull moment in this Asghar Farhadi film. Thefilm opens with a court scene, where a magistrate is only heard on screen, notseen (a craft perfected in a superb Iranian 2004 film by director MohsenAmiryousefi called Bitter Dream).What is not seen is a deliberate effort by the director to hide the lessrelevant details and focus instead on the more important. The magistrate asks Simin (played by thebeautiful Leila Hatami, who has played roles for Mehrjui and Kiarostami in thepast, and is a daughter of another Iranian film director of repute—Ali Hatami)why does she think her daughter has no future in Iran. The question is notanswered by Simin but her body language does. This is the first of the only twoovertly political comments that this critic spotted in the film. It is not easy to make an honest film in Iran. Asghar Farhadi seems to walk the tight rope with a panache while others get into trouble with the authorities.

Nader and Simin: A Separation is a tale of half truths and the impact of thesehalf truths on various individuals, on growing children who look upon theirparents as role models, and on relationships of teachers in schools with theparents of their students. It is also a tale of conflicts of class and wealthin society. But most of all, it is not cinema of escapism, but of reality. Thefilm presents a very real modern day Iran—and this critic has visited Iran onfive occasions over two decades on official work related to agriculture,interacting with ordinary citizens, scientists, and a succession of powerfulFederal Ministers in that field. Iranians are a very intelligent and admirablepeople, in spite of the current public intolerance of other faiths. The second evidenceof political criticism (if it was meant to be one) in this film that I spottedwas the Alzheimer-stricken father of Nader wearing a necktie and being drivenin a car in public places in Iran. Why Nader did that is not explained in the film.In Iran, only foreigners wear neckties, as other citizens could face the wrathof the moral police that often terrorize the public.

While much of the film delves into the conflict between twocouples--one rich, one poor—arising out of the outraged knee-jerk anger of aloving son (on seeing his father left unattended and fallen on the ground with his hands tied to the bed-rail) expressedtowards his female house employee who had neglected her responsibility and steppedout of the house, the film surprises the viewer at every stage like a thriller. A major surprise is when thepivotal figure in the film turns out to be the young girl, Termeh, and not her parents, Nader and Simin,as the title of the film would have led the viewer to believe. Farhadi’s film has made a great leap byallowing a young girl to make the major decision in the film that will affect her parents and eventually her like an adult having watched adults and their behavior. It does not matter what the decision is—what matters is who makes the decision, in a world wherethe males made all the decisions. (Interestingly, the young girl in the movieis played by Farhadi’s real life daughter.) Ironically, the viewers will recallthe film had begun with a woman demanding a better deal for her daughter. Farhadi has made a film that re-defines therole of women in modern Iran (and why not, when the first Nobel Prize winner inIran was a woman, Shrin Ebadi!) while men only seem to care and give priority toother men over women (at least in in this cinematic tale). It is a great film that focuses on women and the girl child in Iran.

Farhadi’s film is one that will have universal acceptance because what is shown on screen will appeal to most viewers worldwide. The performancesare truly outstanding. The editing is equally commendable. And for Farhadi tohave developed the tale from real life observations the effort is commendable. True to thedirector’s recent trends in exhibiting improved abilities with each film, I hope the nextFarhadi film outdoes this film in overall merit. Farhadi seems to have raised hisown bar for his next jump.

P.S. Nader and Simin: ASeparation ranks as one of the 10 best films of 2011 for the author. AsgharFarhadi’s About Elly was reviewedearlier on this blog. Iranian films by Mehrjui, Kiarostami, Panahi, Naderi,Amiryousefi, Makhmalbaf, and Majidi have been also been reviewed earlier.

122. Canadian director Sébastien Pilote’s debut film feature film “Le vendeur” (The Salesman) (2011): White lies to make people happy and sell products that are not essential for the buyer

2011-12-28T05:49:00.001-08:00

If there is one director who has made his presencefelt with a debut in 2011, it is Sébastien Pilote from Canada. Few have heardof him, and even fewer have seen his first feature film The Salesman. The Salesman is probably one of the most powerful films from Canada in recent decadesthat recall the quiet intensity of the works of Canadian directors Claude Jutraand Norman McLaren, some forty or fifty years ago. The Salesman was honoured with the Jury’s Grand Prize and the Best Actor SilverGateway award at the recently concluded Mumbai International Film Festivalwhere the competition section is only open to debut films across the world.Having caught up with the film at the International Film Festival of Kerala,one realizes that the Mumbai jury had honoured the two aspects of the moviethat truly make it a rewarding experience—the direction and the acting.

The Salesman does not have the trappings of a ponderous movie. Yet, this criticconsiders it as one of the finest films of 2011. It captures the global concerns of theday—unusual weather changes and economic turmoil that affect almost allcitizens globally. Yet the film is not ostensibly about either of those twosubjects. The weather and the economic upheaval that leaves so many joblessremain as a bleak backdrop for this lovely tale of an individual whose life isinteresting while on screen and will be interesting for the viewer long afterthe movie gets over. That is precisely what makes the film stand out—a “lovely”humanistic tale against the “dark” background. It gives you an indication ofthe contrasts that the film provides the viewer at several stages of the film.Everything in the film needs re-evaluation in each differing context—what islovely could take on a dark hue.

It is a tale of a car salesman in a small town inQuebec, Canada, that is reeling under some 250 plus days of continuous snow anda local economic catastrophe of the impending closure of a paper mill that directlyand indirectly supports the town’s population. Who is he? "I sell cars, that's all," says the salesman in the film. That's the devotion and the single purpose of his life as it appears for the viewer.

It is essentially about business ethics that oughtto make many students of business schools squirm-- if they have a conscience. Asuccessful salesman has to show results, not once but several times, andespecially in bad times of recession. Canadian actor Gilbert Sicotte (who hasbeen associated with so many good Canadian films) plays the affable MarcelLevesque, the elderly car salesman. A successful salesman is not a new conceptin cinema—David Mamet’s play that was made into a film by James Foley andcalled Glengarry Glen Ross (1992) and Arthur Miller’s play made into a film by Volker Schlondorf f calledDeath of a Salesman (1985) seemed to have flogged the angst of the textbook salesman to theextreme. But Pilote’s debut film provides a new perspective—once a salesman,always a salesman. The true salesman is indestructible. Irrespective of whathappens, they go on and on. In a way Pilote’s film The Salesman reminds the viewer indirectly that all true professionals aresimilar—once they are good at a job they never give up, till they are made tostop by external forces or physical handicaps. A doctor remains a doctor, ajournalist a journalist, a scientist a scientist, an actor an actor, if theyare good at their job, even after they are shaken mid-career by personal lossesthat question whether all their devotion was worth it.

Examine the film’s tale from the viewpoint ofbusiness managers. A good salesman is a goose that lays golden eggs. A healthy,smart business organization rewards the top performer always, in the presenceof less competent salesmen. The top performer is given the more difficult of assignments—herein this Pilote film of selling a fleet of new vehicles to the policedepartment. The salesman’s manager (read the ideal human resource manager) issensitive to the personal upheavals of his staff’s lives—and even suggests thathis top salesman take a break. But will a good professional take a break orkeep on working towards new goals set by the organization?

Then again the film is really a film on balancingethics with being good at your job, being the best in the rat race. It might bephilosophically an existential question. Do we live to be happy having livedethically in our professional careers or do we give more importance to win therace and keep our pay packets secure? These are not questions asked in thefilm—these are implicit questions for the viewer as the film ends. And that forthis critic is the reason why the film gains importance. And it is thisjudgement of each viewer that will morally assess the salesman who cares little about what happens or what could happen to the buyer after the sale, in the medium term. And I am quitesure there will many who will debate their individual viewpoints after themovie gets over.

The film is a wonderful example of a film driven bya great performance. Actor Gilbert Sicotte, always well dressed and quietlypersuasive, not just brings on screen the character of a perfect salesman, butalso makes the viewer like the character. The salesman treats his co-workerswell and they in turn even admire him. He is a good parent and a goodgrandparent. One of the finest and delicate sequences in the film is of the grandfatherteaching his grandson the Lord’s prayer. There is another innocuous sequencewhen the salesman quietly joins the jobless workers of the paper factory in agroup prayer. Religion is compacted into very few scenes in the film but howpowerful those scenes are can only be assessed at the end of the film. Perhapsit is intense religion that keeps the salesman ticking. And may be not.

Then there is a relationship between a father and a daughter.The affection of a daughter towards the widower father is not just the in food shebrings him but in the understanding thatthe best gift she could provide her father would be to make him happy in hisjob as a salesman by driving down to pick up a vehicle to humour her father’sclient’s wishes.Pilote’s direction comes to the fore with the visuals of the employed salesman driving past thejobless workers and the innocuous statement of the salesman that he believes inkeeping his clients happy. The salesman says "You have to like the people. And you need to look into their eyes. If you look into their eyes, you look into their souls." Pilote’s marked ability to develop a characterindirectly by beading simple incidents is fascinating. The salesman prides in knowinghis clients. Yet you know from an earlier Pilote sequence that he doesn’t knowthem or rather he has forgotten them in spite of keeping a tape recorder to learn from his own mistakes and become even better at his work. Yet he goes on with his job aware that hemight be bringing misery to others than happiness. Pilote's film accentuates the contradictions.

Two incidents late into the film provide the pivotalintensity by which the film needs to be evaluated. And interestingly the twoincidents help the viewer to evaluate and revaluate the salesman.

The film exudes a quiet power that is gripping andthought provoking, as the final scene of the film of the salesman looking atthe arrival of the next lot of vehicles to sell. You might not get the feelingthat you are watching great cinema unfold on screen but if you care to reflecton what you saw after the film concludes you will realize that Pilote’s filmpacks a punch that becomes obvious over time as you reflect on the issuespresented in the film that have universal significance today. Like the salesman who claims to know his clients' souls by looking into their eyes, Pilote's film allows the viewer to "see" the soul of the salesman.

P.S. The Salesman ranks as one of the 10 best films of 2011 for the author.

121. US director Terrence Malick’s “Tree of Life” (2011): An exquisite cinematic product grappling with metaphysics and theology

2011-11-19T20:33:00.000-08:00

Terrence Malick has made only five feature films to date, all made in the US. The five films have won a solitary Oscar (for Nestor Almendros's cinematography in Days of Heaven), although many of his films have made the grade of garnering numerous unsuccessful Oscar nominations. On the other hand, Malick’s The Thin Red Line won the Golden Bear at Berlin Film Festival, Days of Heaven won the Best Director award at Cannes, and now The Tree of Life has won the coveted Golden Palm at Cannes, awards that have eluded many Oscar winners. These facts themselves speak loudly about the quality of Malick’s cinema, appreciated more in Europe than in the US.

For this critic, too, only three of the five Malick feature films, the same three that won acclaim in Europe, bear the stamp of truly outstanding cinema. In contrast, many American viewers to this day find his debut film Badlands, which has certain elements that recall the typical Hollywood entertainment ingredients of the Sixties and Seventies, and The New World with its historical magnetism to be equally enchanting.

The Tree of Life is arguably Malick’s finest and the most profound work to date. It is not an easy film to appreciate and will leave an impatient viewer totally perplexed and frustrated. If a viewer had no idea of Malick’s cinema and had come to watch a typical action film with Brad Pitt and/or Sean Penn, that person would indeed feel cheated. If a viewer was not used to a narrative cinema continually switching between past and present with long sequences of film that appeared to be out of the Discovery TV channel and not pick up the relevance of the editing, the experience would be akin to a viewer wondering if the reels of the film were mixed up by the projectionist. (Interestingly, I recall similar reactions in the early Seventies when Stanley Kubrick’s 2001-A Space Odyssey was released. Young students went to see the film to get a “high” after smoking hashish, because of the long psychedelic and colourful sequences the film had of the journey to Jupiter, with no spoken words, accompanied by superb music in near empty theatres, totally oblivious of Kubrick’s intent.)

Malick’s cinema is different. Malick’s films are the works of an erudite filmmaker and, therefore seek to communicate with a viewership that has the patience and humility to listen to profound rhetorical questions asked for the benefit of the viewer. These films are the antithesis of popular cinema with slick talk and frenzied action. Malick’s works—at least the three that I admire most—tend to deceive the impatient viewer who refuses to probe a movie beyond the obvious. Malick’s The Thin Red Line was less about the heroics of war but more about the ethical and reflective mind of the soldier who is able to comprehend his actions and put them in the perspective with nature’s majesty. Malick’s Days of Heaven provided the viewer with awesome images of difficult calamities and the travails of the urban poor running away for refuge in rural America that sandwich a period of magical carefree rural lifestyle of love that embraces the wonders of nature around us that one often tends to ignore. The natural “heaven” in Days of Heaven is not so obvious but it is there in spite of the locusts and the fire that dominate the film. In The Tree of Life, each and every sequence of natural beauty, is a tool for the viewer to help understand the metaphysical and moral education of Jack (the director’s alter ego) that incorporates the lessons Jack has learnt from his father and mother, and most all his brother.

Malick is not a film director who makes films just for the love of the medium. He intelligently uses cinema, combining both music and images, as a tool to discuss his favourite metaphysical and theological concerns. Swedish director Ingmar Bergman did this often to question conventional Christian concepts his own father, a priest, had brought him up to respect and believe in. Bergman’s “Man-God trilogy” of Through a Glass Darkly, Winter Light and The Silence almost rejects God as a metaphorical spider in the first, accepts God in the second despite doubts, wrestles ambiguously with God’s silence that even Mother Teresa had found so difficult to accept. Andrei Tarkovsky did the same but very subtly—Tarkovsky’s strong Russian Orthodox Christian roots silently emerge in Solyaris (Solaris), The Stalker, and his final film Sacrifice, while the subjects of these films were not overtly spiritual. (Few are aware that Tarkovsky was an intensely religious Russian Orthodox Christian and knew St. Mathew’s Gospel in the Bible by rote, the very same book that Italian Pier Paolo Pasolini made into a fascinating work of cinema called Gospel According to St. Mathew). The Tree of Life needs to be evaluated the way one evaluates a Tarkovsky, a Bergman, or a Pasolini—all classics of international cinema.

There are different strokes to appreciate Malick’s The Tree of Life. The obvious one is that of a theist, a believer in God or Allah or any name you prefer to give the Creator. The first clue the viewer gets is the quotation "Where were you when I laid the foundations of the Earth, when the morning stars sang together, and all the sons of God shouted for joy?" (Chap 38,verses 4 and 7) from the Book of Job—a book from the Old Testament of the Bible. It is arguably the oldest book of the Bible, a tale that existed before Genesis was written and accepted by the Abrahamic religions. (For Muslims, Job is also part of the Holy Quran) The Book of Job is built around an individual, a God-fearing theist who questions God on why he of all people has been deprived of all things material and familial but yet stoically chooses to accept and revere God. In Malick’s film, a deeply God-fearing religious Texan family is deprived of one of their three sons, not unlike Job. The mother, Mrs O’Brien, the embodiment of grace in the film mimics Job’s reactions after the loss, with the words “I will be true to you. Whatever comes.” A major problem for viewers of The Tree of Life would be the constant references to the Book of Job, in case they are not familiar with the text. A quotation from the book kicks off the film. Fortunately, this critic had studied the book as a prescribed optional text for his postgraduate degree in English Literature from Bombay University, not merely as a religious text. Some of the text is explained by the priest’s sermon in the film. No one knows who wrote the Book of Job and literary scholars have concluded that the present form of the book is the product of oral literature and that the current version is the product of at least three different authors. Malick distills the essence of Job’s metaphysical travails into a simple event—the death of a 19-year old that occurs early in the film. For cineastes like me, the event and the progression of the film is reminiscent of the structure of Polish director Krzysztof Kieslowski’s French movie Three Colors: Blue, which interestingly Kieslowski and his screenplaywriter Krzysztof Piesiewicz similarly modelled on an important philosophical chapter of the Bible: I Corinthians 13. Mallick’s film, too, recalls the Kieslowski’s film, when Mrs O’Brien speaks the words “The only way to be happy is to love. Unless you love, your life will flash by.” Those words of Mrs O’Brien reflect the same ultimate realization of actor Julliete Binoche’s character in the French/Polish film following the death of an important member of the family, early in the Kieslowski film.

For Malick, the Job-like realization of Mrs O’Brien is only a tool for the full education and sensitization of her eldest son, Jack (who probably embodies the young Malick, growing up in Waco, Texas, the name emblazoned on the truck spewing DDT, in the film), played by Sean Penn, who has grown up to be a successful urban architect of repute. The success of Jack seems to recall the words of his father Mr O’Brien “Your mother's naive. It takes fierce will to get ahead in this world. If you're good, people take advantage of you.” We can assume Jack had followed his father thus far—following the way of nature. But when Jack’s brother dies, Jack realizes his folly—he needs to follow the way of grace embodied in his mother. What results in the film is an abstract journey (a path to nirvana of sorts) from the worlds of steel and glass, through a derelict wooden door frame (symbolic of the transformation of Jack) as he is led by a woman (either his mother or his spouse), through rocky crevices to a sea shore where all the persons he has met in life are alive and well. The sudden action of falling on his knees is the dawning of nirvana in Jack that links the viewer back to the opening words: “Brother. Mother. It was they who led me to your door.” To the attentive listener, the framework of the entire film had already been presented with the opening quotation from the Book of Job, followed by these words of Jack, before you even see a single person on screen. Apart from the Book of Job, there are several references to the 23^rd chapter of the Book of Psalms. Now to an atheist viewer, or a cineaste who is merely interested in pure cinema, all this could appear to be hogwash. But is it?

If you prefer to put aside religion and theology in The Tree of Life, a moot question would be: Can an atheist enjoy and appreciate The Tree of Life? This critic would fault the marketing of The Tree of Life for audiences who are not familiar with the cinema of Malick, a method of presenting a tale increasingly being adopted by other filmmakers such as French director Claire Denis and Turkish director Semih Kaplanoglu. There is a link between these directors' separate works that moviegoers could pick up. Alert viewers of Malick’s The Thin Red Line would recall a flame in the middle of a dark screen that began the film. The flame reappears prominently later in the film when the Sean Penn character in the film as an avuncular boss interacts with the AWOL character played by Jim Caviezel. There is the following spoken lines Pvt. Bell from The Thin Red Line : “Love. Where does it come from? Who lit this flame in us? No war can put it out, conquer it. I was a prisoner. You set me free.” That sequence too underlined connection of the flame and “grace” glorified in The Tree of Life. This flame symbol takes a more evocative level of punctuation between segments of The Tree of Life, including the start of the film. The transformation of the troubled adult Jack in The Tree of Life begins with Jack lighting the flame of a blue candle. A flame that symbolizes light in darkness and knowledge of creation. The chain of thought is endless. In The Thin Red Line, an alligator slithering into the forest ponds opened the film only to be strung up as dead meat for soldiers later in the film. In The Tree of Life you have large dinosaurs for the creation sequences, followed by sequence of a lizard brought into the house by young Jack and his siblings.

In The Thin Red Line, there is a voice-over rhetorical question from Col. Toll about trees and nature: “Look at this jungle. Look at those vines, the way they twine around, swallowing everything. Nature's cruel.” In The Tree of Life, Mr O’Brien representing “nature” is the parent growing trees and getting his son to tend the lawn in front of their house. It is important for the viewer to recall the first spoken words in The Tree of Life: “Brother. Mother. It was they who led me to your door.” The father is NOT one who ultimately transforms the adult Jack.

For those who love good cinema, the following sequence epitomizes Malick’s cinema like no other. A character (the mother) receives bad news. No word is spoken. There is a sob of grief. Cut to the loud whirr of airplane engine. A telephone call is answered in the midst of the din. No word can be heard, only the loud engine. The engine sound suddenly fades and you hear bells of a church. This is typical of Malick’s cinema. Spoken words are minimal and when they are spoken they are often as a voice-over. Sometimes, the voice is not that of the person on screen.

Malick’s dialectics are essentially rhetorical questions and exclamations made by the characters in his films, with you the viewer emerging as the judge of the series of spoken viewpoints. It is Malick, the teacher of philosophy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) taking over, or perhaps Malick the Harvard and Oxford university alumnus taking over. For instance, in The Thin Red Line a soldier asks another who has a Greek name “Did you read Homer?” The question may seem out of place but if the viewer is familiar with Homer’s epics the situation on screen gets a new perspective. In Malick’s The New World samples of voice-overs are “Who are you, what do you dream of?” with the answer from lead female Pocahontas “We are like grass.” Very few directors have attempted this—and viewers who are new to the cinema of Malick, Kubrick, Tarkovsky, Syberberg, Zvyagintsev, Ruiz, and Claire Denis will find such works “pretentious” just because the grammar of their cinema requires the viewer to be attentive and patient and constantly reflect on what they see and, most of all, what they hear. Mallick, and filmmakers like him, give more attention to nature, the flora and fauna, to tell a story of human beings.

In The Tree of Life, Mrs O’Brien, the mother, represents grace. She says: “Grace doesn't try to please itself. Accepts being slighted, forgotten, disliked. Accepts insults and injuries.” quite in contrast to her husband who teaches his sons to be “fierce.. to get ahead in this world. If you're good, people take advantage of you.” Jack later realizes that his father, an evidently clever God-fearing man, who has 27 patents to his name, loses his job eventually. Jack even begins to hate his father and eventually the grown up Jack apologizes to his father for something he said following his brother’s demise. Jack’s father's self realization (another voice over) is another lesson in life: “I wanted to be loved because I was great, a Big Man. Now I'm nothing. Look. The glory around... trees, birds... I dishonoured it all and didn't notice the glory. A foolish man.”

The basic structure of The Tree of Life is birth, acceptation of siblings, ability to differentiate between good and bad, awareness of the less privileged, sexual awakening, loss of social security of a parent, death of a loved one, and the understanding of why death is a part of the larger scheme of the Creator of the universe. This basic structure is punctuated by visuals of the creation of the universe which puts in context the differences of the two parents of Jack. There is a dinosaur who almost kills a smaller one and yet does not but instead goes in search of another—is it the anguish of a mother who has lost her progeny? The volcanic lava meeting waves of the sea might appear to have little relevance in the Malick tale but it has considerable import if you consider the constant nature vs. grace turmoil in the O’Brien family. The final words of Mrs O’Brien the viewer hears are: "I give him to you. I give you my son." These are words of considerable theological relevance coming from a woman who was initially grieving the loss of a 19-year old son. This lady also says another important line: “Help each other. Love everyone. Every leaf. Every ray of light. Forgive.” Every leaf, every ray of light, is precisely what Malick underscores for the viewer in The Tree of Life. The visuals of creation, from the cell to the planets, nature’s beauty ranging from a butterfly to a tree, are interlinked with message of good living and understanding life for both a theist and an atheist. Malick's achievement in this film is his ability to telescope the development of Jack's body and mind with the cosmic development of earth, its fauna and flora. Kubrick's attempt in 2001--A Space Odyssey looked at the external cosmic beauty and man's preoccupation with machines, not with individual minds. Malick has broken that boundary.

One wishes Malick explained the absence of the third son towards the end. The third was not the kid who drowned—that was a kid from a neighbour’s family. Jack seems to be influenced by one sibling who dies, and not so by the other. The O’Brien family’s attitude to race relations is ambiguous while Mrs O’Brien goes out of the way to provide drinking water to arrested and disturbed individuals in police custody. There is compassion exhibited for all including frogs that some thoughtless kids tie up to a firecracker rocket for fun.

There is much more to this film than all this. There is the relevance for each piece of music used in The Tree of Life--pieces of music and chorale pieces carefully chosen by Malick. Malick's wide-ranging knowledge of music and the dogged effort he makes to identify the right piece for each film surpasses that of Kubrick, Peter Weir, Michael Mann, and Andrei Tarkovsky, all directors who have proven their skills in this field. The Tree of Life is a film that demands several viewings to digest the varied details and the full perspective of what these have to offer for an attentive viewer.

I recall, as a wet-behind-the-ears film critic, recommending in a New Delhi daily that I worked for in 1979 that one of the finest films on show during an International Film Festival of India was an Andrei Tarkovsky film showing at the now defunct Archana theatre. The disgruntled viewers who could not appreciate the film damaged the seats of the theatre. The next day I was pulled up by my News Editor. If the same film was to be screened today in New Delhi there could be a totally different reaction because more people are aware of what to expect from a Tarkovsky film. So, too, is the case of Terrence Malick’s movies—the more you see a Malick film with patience, the more you realize what it has to offer. Perhaps then a viewer will appreciate the philosophical words spoken in The Tree of Life: “I am nothing...Keep us. Guide us. Till the end of time.”

P.S. The films The Thin Red Line, Days of Heaven, Three Colors: Blue, Through a Glass Darkly, Winter Light and The Silence have been reviewed earlier on this blog. The Tree of Life ranks as one of the 10 best films of 2011 for the author.

120. Romanian director Cristi Puiu’s “Moartea domnului Lazarescu” (The Death of Mr Lazarescu) (2005): Loving thy neighbour as thyself

2011-09-10T07:50:00.000-07:00

No Romanian film that this writer has seen has been as honest, as gripping, and as well crafted as Cristi Puiu’s The Death of Mr Lazarescu. It bolsters the credibility of Romanian cinema, which has traditionally lagged behind the rich cinematic products of the former USSR (e.g., Tarkovsky, Paradjanov, Kozintsev), of Hungary (e.g., Fabri, Szabo), of Poland (e.g., Kieslowski, Wajda) and even of the former Czechoslovakia (e.g., Forman, Kadar, Trnka). For the Romanian viewer, this movie could touch a raw nerve that relates to the true state of Romanian hospitals, the attitudes of their medical staff and their ability to care for the sick and elderly slice of the Romanian population. It is indeed a societal and psychological study of the varied behaviour patterns of emergency room staff under stress. From this viewer's perspective, the film's tale could easily extrapolate a similar situation anywhere on this planet—in a rich developed country or in a poor developing country. The film transcends man-made boundaries. It is a tale of gradual loss of independence as one’s health deteriorates. It is indeed a degrading experience when one wishes for the proximity of their dear ones.

All of us assume that if we have a medical emergency someone would rush us to an emergency room of a hospital where our ailment would get immediate and due attention. But what if we have that unfortunate requirement shortly after a major accident (or for that matter, a terrorist attack, or a fire, or a building collapse) near the hospital and we reach the hospital emergency room when every worker at the hospital is stretched to the limit. If you subscribe to Murphy’s law that ‘if anything can go wrong, it will go wrong,’ this movie is for you to appreciate and reflect on its amazing contents.

Director Puiu’s film The Death of Mr Lazarescu has won at least 24 awards, including the prestigious Prize of the 2005 Cannes Film Festival’s Un Certain Regard section, the Golden Swan at the Copenhagen Film Festival, and a Silver Hugo at the Chicago Film Festival. Interestingly, this is the first of six films the director intends to make that revolve around Bucharest and its environs, each a treatise on love, this one being a film dealing with love for fellow men. The other five are to be films on (a) love between a man and a woman, (b) love for one’s children, (c) love for success, (d) love between friends, and (e) carnal love. Is this Romania’s answer to the Polish genius Kieslowski’s Dekalog, which had each of its 10 episodes devoted to one of the Ten Commandments? I do hope it is. (His second film Aurora, in this proposed series of six films, has been made in 2010 and screened at the Cannes Film Festival but this writer has yet to view it.)

Puiu and his co-scriptwriter Razvan Radelescu developed a fascinating yet dour character they call Mr Dante Remus Lazarescu. That name is heavy with allusions. Dante, we know, is associated with the famous writer Dante Alighieri (1265-1321) who wrote The Divine Comedy describing man’s journey through Hell, Purgatory and Paradise. Remus, we know, is associated with Romulus and Remus, the two mythical shepherds who are credited to have built the city of Rome. Now Remus was killed by Romulus and his henchmen for leaping over a wall built by Romulus, but some writers alternately suggest Remus died from natural causes, and not killed. But eventually Romulus went on to bury Remus with pomp and regret. The name Lazarescu would recall the two distinct Lazaruses mentioned in the Bible associated with the Gospels—one is a Lazarus who is raised from the dead by Jesus and the other is a Lazarus who is poor and sick, and lives off the crumbs of a rich man's table, eventually dying to reach heaven while the rich man goes to hell. Imagine mixing all these details to weave a single character in the film, which interestingly is not about Mr Dante Remus Lazarescu or his death but about his last days on earth. The movie is about how others deal with him and how one person decides to take care of a stranger who needs help. Yet each element of this unusual name is important to appreciate the depth of the film’s script.

Mr Lazarescu of Puiu’s film is an average human being, not very rich, not very poor, living alone in a small apartment with cats as his only company. He is probably living a retired life. His wife is either dead or has left him. His only progeny, a daughter, has married and migrated to another country, Canada. His closest kin is a sister who lives in another town and is an eager recipient of some money he sends from time to time. We learn that he had been operated for an ulcer in his stomach. His young neighbours in the apartment building hate his cats and have very little time for him as they are immersed in their daily chores. Mr Lazarescu’s only “friend,” other than his cats, is his bottle of liquor. Inevitably, when Mr Lazarescu has a severe and persisting headache and is vomiting blood even after taking some pills available in his apartment and his neighbour’s apartment, he is stinking of liquor. However, the interesting script of Puiu and Radelescu adds an interesting detail: Mr Lazarescu, in spite of his pain, loneliness, and his awareness that he needs urgent medical help, worries about feeding his cats and sending money to his sister who desperately needs it. But how do people deal with such an individual in that condition? That is the core structure of Puiu’s cinematic essay, not so much the conditions of emergency rooms in hospitals.

As Mr Lazarescu awaits his ambulance to arrive, his neighbours do provide minimal succour of providing him a pill for headaches and even offers a bite to eat. When the ambulance and its paramedic appears on the scene, the neighbours cry off the responsibility of accompanying Mr Lazarescu to the hospital—their priorities lie elsewhere. It is the paramedic who has never met Mr Lazarescu before, who realizes he has no one to care for him. It is the paramedic who decides that he needs urgent medical attention (after having made an interesting medical diagnosis through her years of experience rather than medical studies), who takes his papers, and who accompanies the sick man the entire night. But on that fateful night, just before Mr Lazarescu reaches the first hospital, the emergency room has its hands full, dealing with scores of other equally critical patients as a result of a bus accident.

What ensues later are a series of encounters between doctors of all hues and the paramedic accompanying the patient. There are tired doctors, irascible doctors, egoistic doctors, caring, empathetic doctors, doctors sexually attracted to other doctors, doctors with dark humour, doctors who go by the rulebook and not common sense, doctors who use every trick they know to get another doctor to attend on a serious patient, and even brilliant doctors who can diagnose the condition of the patient with alacrity, all quilted and sketched out with remarkable credibility that makes the viewer wonder if the movie has indeed transformed from fiction into a documentary.

A powerful subplot of the film involves the stand-offs between qualified specialist doctors and the less qualified paramedics. It is interesting to note the intolerance of the educated towards well meaning less-educated individuals with lots of experience. Also captured by the lovely script is the intolerance of doctors towards a sick patient smelling of liquor and having a sharp tongue.

Many viewers noting the similarity of the names Lazarus and Lazarescu might expect this movie to be about death or even surviving death. The film is not about either of those scenarios. The film is about how people react to situations where a person is nearing the end of one's life and how we behave towards such individuals in such situations. Lazarescu’s life might have been saved if one of the doctors saw the urgency of his medical condition and did not toss the patient to the next convenient hospital to reduce work load and offload accountability. The film might show the emergency room and the pressures of that environment. But it is actually a film that asks the viewer to look at ourselves and our behaviour towards others. Only one individual, the paramedic goes out of the way to help a stricken stranger, even when she knows from experience it is a no-win situation. Yet, she extends a hand in help to a man without any kin, just as she would care for a family member, asking no reward for doing so.

That brings us back to the name of Dante Remus Lazarescu. Who is the "Lazarus" here? One realizes the parallels in the movie are more related to the Lazarus, the beggar with sores eating off the crumbs of the rich man’s table (read emergency room of hospitals). Who is the "Remus" here? One recalls the fable of the creator of Rome and one might see the parallels with Remus who was killed but officially considered to have died a natural death. Did the lack of love in the emergency rooms kill "Remus" Lazarescu, which would eventually be labelled as natural death. Who is "Dante" here? Lazarescu appears in this film progressing through “Hell” of the Divine Comedy. Comedy, you ask? What can you say of doctors who insist on a signature on a form to absolve the doctors from blame by a dying man, who is not in his senses, before conducting a major operation? The film is supposed to be based on actual events; yet the name of the dying man decided by the filmmakers is not without substance.

This notable Romanian film does not merely rely on the strong script but a bravura acting performance of the entire cast. The flawless performances of each player in the film are astounding. The viewer begins to feel that these are real people--such is the effect of the film. At the end of the film there is silence as the patient is ready for the operation and is left alone. The film does not have to state anything further. What the film had to state has been eloquently said already. As Shakespeare’s Hamlet stated with his powerful final words: “The rest is silence.”

P.S. Two segments of Kieslowski's ten-part Dekalog have been reviewed earlier on this blog. Dekalog part 5 deals with the Commandment "Thou shall not kill" and Dekalog part 7 deals with the Commandment "Thou shalt not steal."

119. French director Claire Denis’ “L’intrus” (The Intruder) (2004): Conscience as an intruder

2011-08-28T09:51:00.000-07:00

The Intruder begins with an opening quote "Your worst enemies are hiding inside, in the shadows, in your heart." As the film rolls on you realize this film is not a regular movie that you come across. It has touches of Andrei Tarkovsky, of Terrence Mallick, of Carlos Reygadas’ Silent Light. This writer is pleasantly surprised as this is the first Claire Denis directorial effort (of 10 works to date) that he has watched, though he had seen several works (“Hanna K,” “Paris, Texas,” “The Secret”) on which the lady was the assistant director. The Intruder is definitely a film that makes you think. It is also true that it is a film that would put off the impatient viewer. Yet, it is an important film from France that can mesmerise you. This film of Claire Denis clearly puts her in a league of the finest filmmakers making films today.

The film is interestingly a film about dogs and people who love dogs (it actually begins and ends with dogs). It is a film about love between a father and a son and their inability to manifest it. It is a film that touches on regret for the lack of love in physical relationships. It is a film like a Tarkovsky film (sudden rains) or a Mallick film (sudden gusts of wind) where nature is thrust on the viewer: Denis’ screenplay includes a suggestion to a woman to listen to the “sounds in a forest” as a foreplay bout before copulation, and of images of a woman lost in tall grass even with the aid of binoculars, of the sound of intruders outside a house, of idyllic flowing streams. To many the film would appear disjointed, in the same way a first-time reader of the Nobel Prize-winning James Joyce’s Ulysses, without sufficient introduction to his style of writing (“stream of consciousness,” epiphanies, puns, and metaphors), is likely to wonder what the book is all about.

In the context of books, the film is indeed an idea that director Clair Denis “abducted” (a term from a Denis post-screening press conference) from a book L’intrus by Jean-Luc Nancy which deals with heart transplants, how the body tends to reject a transplanted organ, how they either survive or die. The relationship between the book and the film is as tenuous as the relationship between James Jones’ novel The Thin Red Line and Malick’s movie The Thin Red Line. Denis uses the concept of heart transplant and even shows exaggerated scars of a heart transplant operation—but for Denis one suspects this transplant is a Joycean dream or a metaphor for another malaise—the lack of love or the inability to win it from your progeny.

The lack of love “dogs” (pun intended) you, the viewer, throughout the film. The film begins with a policewoman at an international border with a dog. The woman showers affection on the dog. Her house-husband showers affection and care his wife and twin children. The main character Louis Trebor (Michel Subor) also showers affection on his “twin” dogs. His neighbour is a woman who breeds dogs either as a profession or as a passion and she too expresses love and affection for her canines. This neighbour is finally shown shouting with joy on a sled pulled by dogs at the end of the film.

In sharp contrast to the love showered on dogs there is the lack of love elsewhere in relationships between humans. Louis Trebor gives money to his son in France with a tinge of regret rather than of love. When he sleeps with his female pharmacist friend the script of Denis employs the words “Medication, schemedication” to describe loveless carnal relationship (in fact he kills a man who tries to enter his house between bouts of sex). There is no love between Louis Trebor and his enigmatic female neighbour. There is no love between Trebor and a Tahitian woman (real or imaginary), who has apparently borne his son ages ago and Trebor has never bothered to keep in touch with the woman on his son from that relationship. Finally, Trebor has so many women in his life, but no wife or spouse. What is his puzzling relationship with dog rearing neighbour? Both are interested in each other but also seem to dislike the other. Everything is vague, probably indicating that you are viewing a dream. This is where the viewer has to decide eventually what is real in the film and what is a dream.

The existential aspect of the main character reminds one of Albert Camus’ The Stranger. Who is Trebor? He has several passports that you see him destroy. He can kill silently and has a strong physique. He has made sufficient money from his prior activities stashed away in a Swiss bank with which he can buy a “heart” for himself and a Korean ship for his son. Trebor, the man who loved his dogs, leaves his dogs behind with sacks of dog-food to fend for themselves, as he goes on the mission to acquire a new “heart”, contact with a lost son, a ship for his existing son. Can the acquisition of a new heart lead to acquiring love? Is there a connection that Denis alludes to between Trebors love for his twin dogs and Trebor's son's exemplary devotion towards his twin children, while there is hardly an affection between Trebor and his son? The questions are there in the film, never explicitly put, for the viewer to answer.

Denis has made films on the European/African interface that this writer has not yet seen. The viewer begins to wonder if Denis sees Trebor’s, past life in Tahiti (an island in Southern Pacific Polynesia, which the French had colonised) as the life of an intruder in Polynesia. There are several other such possible metaphors of intrusion strewn in the film. There is a male intruder in Trebor’s house who is killed (Trebor is shown cleaning blood from a knife). There are immigrants who cross the Swiss/French border. One cannot put a finger on who is the main intruder in this film. Most probably the intruder is in Trebor’s heart, physical and/or metaphorical, as stated in the opening quote.

Like the works of Tarkovsky and Mallick, the visuals (cinematographer Agnes Godard, a regular collaborator with Denis on many of her films) and the guitar and trumpet music of Stuart Staples (of the musical group called Tindersticks) play a major part in the film. Without their contribution Denis’ work would seem pedestrian. Agnes Godard and Denis have long magical sequences of the sea as seen from ship’s window (reminds you of Andrei Mikhalkov-Konchalovsky’s final shots of Shy People with the late actress Jill Clayburgh looking out of the window of her aircraft at the dark skyline).

Without any doubt, Claire Denis joins the likes of Terrence Mallick, Andrei Mikhalkov-Konchalovsky, Andrei Zvyagintsev, Carlos Reygadas, Alejandro Gonzales Inarritu, and Nuri Bilge Ceylan as filmmakers who are currently making films that redefine the grammar of contemporary cinema for the intelligent, perceptive and patient viewer. It is the appreciation of films like these that make the application of concepts provided in Immanuel Kant's Critique of Pure Judgement a pleasure for the astute viewer.

P.S. Two films mentioned above, Mallick's The Thin Red Line and Reygadas' Silent Light, have been reviewed earlier on this blog.

118. Indian director Ashim Ahluwalia’s documentary feature “John & Jane” (2005): Juggling truth and fiction

2011-08-24T11:18:00.000-07:00

Documentaries have a discrete charm of their own, especially when they are well made. When this writer lists his 10 favourite movies, one of the 10 is a documentary: a ten-part, 7.5 hour feature documentary called Hitler: a film from Germany, made by Hans-Jürgen Syberberg in 1978. A film as long as that has to be top-notch to keep any viewer interested and energized to return after each break. One of the finest essayists and film critics, Susan Sontag was so enraptured by this documentary that she subsequently wrote a lengthy critique that eventually became a book, incorporating numerous responses that followed Sontag's initial response to the documentary film. Sontag has probably written more on this documentary of Syberberg than all the feature films made by Syberberg’s contemporaries Fassbinder, Herzog, Wenders, Schlondorff, and Schroeter put together. This is an indication of the power of impressive documentaries.

Young Ashim Ahluwalia treads the path taken by Syberberg: getting real characters alongside actors to document reality, provoking the viewer to think while presenting facts and trends that are real and socially important for the viewer to analyze. Today there are several thousand educated Indians who live in India and work “when the city sleeps” in call centres to serve Americans during their daytime. These are Indian workers serving the American public because the work provides them with an income that is more attractive than alternative jobs available to them. And these jobs could trap them into a surreal and demanding lifestyle, if they want to keep their jobs. They have to learn to speak with an American accent and relate with the lifestyle of the distant continent to provide information that is requested or to sell a product of an American company to Americans while sitting in India far removed from the American reality. It is not an easy job as an American doing the job in his own land would demand higher real wages than the Indian. The Indian would have to bear the tantrums of the American who might realize he or she is speaking to a foreigner, if chinks in the accent surface. The Indian worker working in an air-conditioned office through the night has to return each day to sleep in his less attractive and less comfortable home, loud and lacking air-conditioning, while all others at home are either working or doing their normal daytime chores. This disconnect of time and society leads to social and psychological aberrations for the call centre employee answering calls on American 1-800-numbers or telemarketing American products in USA, while sitting in India. And that is the subject of John & Jane. The Americanization of a small urban clutch of Indian call centre workers in their youth who are changing their lives for the sake of money and a job, little realising the slow transformation the job has on their lives. They behave like the bizarre Zelig of Woody Allen’s creative mockumentary movie (1983) of that name.

The film studies how the English speaking Indian is tutored to speak the language with an American drawl and how an American speaks English (‘I kaent do it’ for ‘I can’t do it’) as distinct from the English spoken elsewhere. The film focuses on six individuals at call centers who answer/make the calls by night (Indian time) and have become pretty good at it. Some like it, some don’t but they are doing it for financial security. Their attitude changes slowly. There is a gradual morphing of Indian personalities into Indians who dream to be Americans because they are dreaming of that life style. One of the six Indian (possibly an Anglo-Indian) call center worker is shown eating bacon and eggs at home—which is not an average Indian’s breakfast. One dreams of owning costly bikes. Marriages take place between two such employees and if one spouse changes a job the couple hardly have quality time for themselves and end-up killing time as most American kids do playing video games and eating junkfood available in malls where the average Indian is rarely seen (in this movie). Their names are tweaked and Anglicised to fit their new world of air-conditioned offices and their unnatural fluorescent lighting—the six characters have names like Glen, Sydney, Osmond, Nikki, Nicholas and Naomi. One such employee is seen attending a Christian evangelistic meeting, possibly to cope with the stress or alternatively “to belong” with the world he interacts with each night. The toll of the 14-hour night shifts are varied—some take to drugs, others to junk foods. Some begin to reject their reality of their dingy homes and how their family reacts to their day-time slumber. They are the Johns and Janes that director Ahluwalia has created after studying the world of such employees at work and later when they come home to sleep in the day--some real, some bizarre and some unreal. Exhausted after work, even their dreams relate to their work. At work, each of them have to be consistently polite yet persuasive—which is not easy with temperamental individuals on the other end, when you are constantly being evaluated for your performance and results by your bosses, which in turn decides your pay and whether you keep your job.

The film serves as an eye opener for many in the US who may be unaware of the emotional pressures that play on call centre employees in a distant land who could be upset but is forced to pretend s/he isn’t. One begins to empathize with their lot. That is when young Ahluwalia introduces us to the last of the six employees who called Naomi. She has bleached her skin to resemble a Caucasian. She has dyed her hair blonde and is on the lookout for a blonde partner. The camera of cinematographers Mohanan and Mukul Kishore does not lie—she is not Caucasian, she is an Indian trying to ape a white American.

Ahluwalia has made an interesting film that has touches of Syberberg’s cinema. Fact intertwines with fiction. Are the characters documenting their real lives or are they being made to act out a written script that is a brainchild of the director. The film opens with shots of Indians smoking pot in a car. How and why do they get hooked on hashish? What makes them want to escape their pressures of a night life at a call center? The questions become even more interesting for the global viewer to answer towards the end of the film as any answer to any question would get entangled in the film’s web woven with both fact and fiction. This writer’s daughter noted the obvious connection between this movie and Chetan Bhagat’s novel One Night at the Call Center, a tale revolving around another six somewhat similar call centre workers in India. Both works have hit the streets about the same time--in 2005.

Any which way you look at it, director Ahluwalia has spotted an interesting subject to film and he has done a commendable job. The most arresting aspect bit of John & Jane for this writer was the striking music of Masta Justy (from India), of Metamatics, of the Japanese Minamo, and the minimalist experimental music of Thomas Brinkmann. The sound mixing/editing was top notch—Mohankutty assisted by Resul Pookutty. Oscar winning Resul Pookutty (with Mohankutty) needed to win an Oscar for this film than for the Danny Boyle’s Slumdog Millionaire! The music selected by Ahluwalia embellished the out-of-the-ordinary and disturbing subject: clearly Ahluwalia has a keen ear for music (so does Syberberg)!

It is not surprising that this cinematic work won the Indian national award for the best documentary. The problem for any viewer of this interesting work would be to consider it as a purist's version of what consitutes a documentary. It documents a lifestyle but presents a view of the director. While the documentaries of Robert Flaherty, Norman McLaren, and even Michael Moore have stayed within the boundaries of conventional meaning of the term, intelligent and important directors such as Syberberg, Orson (F for Fake) Welles, and the Iranian Mohsen (Bitter Dreams) Amiryousefi have shown us other creative new boundaries of the term 'documentary.' Young Ashim Ahluwalia joins that second group.

P.S. The Iranian documentary Bitter Dreams by Mohsen Amiryousefi was reviewed earlier on this blog. This blog contains reviews of three other documentaries of note A Song for Argyris (Greece), Reel Injun (Canada), and Leonard Cohen: I am Your Man (Australia).

117. Chinese director Quan’an Wang’s “Tuan yuan” (Apart, together) (2010): A director’s second look on the theme of love between spouses in marriages

2011-07-29T23:17:00.000-07:00

There is every likelihood that a casual viewing of this film will lead many viewers to categorize the movie as just another ordinary love story. And there is a strong possibility for a viewer to even relegate this work as an unimportant one. But is it indeed a movie of little consequence?

The strengths of the film become apparent only when one grasps the larger perspective offered by the film—that the film is not merely a tale of love between particular individuals but a study of the bonds built through proximity and a craving for physical nexus, when and if that bond becomes tenuous. It is also a film that studies bonding in marriages under extreme conditions. And this is not a Chinese problem but increasingly a worldwide phenomenon as spouses are often physically separated for reasons dictated by finance and/or politics.

For those who follow the inherent connections between works of a particular director, here is an example of Chinese director Quan’an Wang continuing his cinematic studies on marriage and the individual that one glimpsed in Tuya’s marriage, the cinematic work that preceded Apart, together. Tuya’s marriage had won the Berlin film festival’s top honour, the Golden Bear in 2006. It is no surprise therefore that Quan’an Wang’s next movie Apart, together opened the Berlin Film Festival 2010 and that this movie went on to win a Silver Bear, not for the direction, not for the acting, but for scriptwriting! Berlin seems to appreciate this director more than other festivals of equal repute. The screenplay incidentally was co-written by director Quan’an Wang and a Chinese actress Na Jin.

The film Apart, together is a tale of an elderly man called Liu from Taiwan (a territory that China refuses to accept as an independent country) who takes an officially approved tour to mainland China’s Shanghai and uses the chance to reunite with his wife Yu-e and his biological son, both of whom he has not met for half a century. Yu-e has during the long absence of her husband married another man Lu, assuming that chances of reuniting with her first husband is ruled out due to the political cold war between Taiwan and mainland China. But consider the interesting script: both the husbands are former soldiers, one a soldier of the Kuomintang army of Taiwan and the other a soldier of the Red army of mainland China. Both soldiers are exceptional: caring and loving husbands, one who has been torn apart from his wife due to politics, and the other who has lived together with his wife ever since his marriage, bonding well with his wife, stepson and other biological children. The oxymoronic title of the film allows the viewer to compare and contrast the behaviours of the two men throughout the film with the wife, common to both men, serving as the pivot of the see-sawing story.

Interestingly, the story of Tuya’s marriage co-written by Quan’an Wang and Wei (Farewell, my concubine and To live) Lu also had a woman Tuya who marries a second husband ironically out of love for her first husband who is a cripple and needs Tuya’s attention and care as do Tuya’s children. It was a fine example of a woman’s devotion for her first love and spouse under extreme, changing conditions. Tuya’s marriage also had its share of international politics (stated in the most unobtrusive manner) as it was set in Chinese Mongolia, bordering the independent Mongolian nation. In Apart, together, the director presents a wife Yu-e, who loves the first husband Liu and father of her first son, wrenched away from her life by politics, and reconciled to the idea that they might never be together again. Like Tuya, for survival, Yu-e marries again, fortunately to a kind and loving husband, Lu. Yu-e, like Tuya, has to make a difficult choice, when her first husband Liu returns and asks her to come with him to Taiwan while compensating Lu and his family monetarily. And like Quan’an Wang’s earlier film all the husbands are accommodating in this film as well. A conundrum indeed, and those who choose to view the film will know the interesting outcome of Yu-e’s decision. In both films, the ultimate decision rests with the woman and after making brave decisions each reviews her fate.

What strikes one is Quan’an Wang’s choice of subjects that he chooses to film. These are not rich or powerful or even politically correct individuals. They are marginalized individuals who are stretched by adversity that was not scripted in an ordinary marriage. The female figure, the wife, makes the crucial decisions that affect the family and her progeny. Quan’an Wang belongs to the “Sixth Generation of Chinese Filmmakers” a generation of filmmakers who love to film such unusual individuals on the fringes of society. (The most interesting filmmakers from China belong to the Fifth and the Sixth Generation.) The Sixth Generation of filmmakers, associated with the late Nineties and the current decade, unlike the Fifth Generation, have made their mark by adopting documentary-like approaches to realistic fiction, capturing the social changes of the day while seeming to consciously reject the high quality standards of the Fifth Generation while infusing a streak of individualism. It would not be surprising for a casual viewer of Chinese cinema used to the rich production values of the Fifth Generation filmmakers, matching the best in Europe and Americas, with unorthodox methods of storytelling to find the works of the Sixth Generation filmmakers less impressive. The Sixth Generation is different and interesting because they tend to present reality in an unconventional way seeking the unusual realistic conditions that do not get associated with the larger segment of the population.

One would assume that the Chinese title “Tuan Yuan” would literally translate into the English title of the movie “Apart, together.” However, the Chinese film critic Maggie Lee states in her review of the film that “Tuan Yuan” actually translates as “happy reunion,” not “apart, together”. That literal meaning would have been adequate only for the reunion of the first husband with his wife, disregarding the equally important segment of the movie dealing with the relationship of the second husband with his wife which is not a happy one once the first husband returns. The official English title “Apart, together” thus adds gravitas to the tale.

The script writers of both Tuya’s marriage and Apart, together are not merely looking at the individuals but at the State’s role in marriage/divorces. In both films the wife and husbands encounter red tape while deciding to take their new paths in life. In both situations offered by the two films, the situation is not the classical one of divorce following an acrimonious marriage but a rare fringe case of keeping all concerned happy and well cared for. These are typical Asian vignettes of marriage where spouses empathize with the future of the other spouse going to extreme trouble to keep the other happy which might seem rather odd to modern Occidental couples.

In both films, marriage does not limit to physical and emotional ties. In both films, and in many other significant films like Changwei Gu’s Kong Que (Peacock), the ritual of the entire family coming together for a meal once or more than once each day, is not merely for a repast but an event where family members take decisions, speak out their thoughts, and decide the future actions. In Apart, together these elements are underscored—especially during one meal when little is eaten on a sumptuous table but the meal is limited to verbal conversation and consumption of liquor. For those who pay attention to screenplays, the works of Quan’an Wang are delectable to scrutinize especially when the characters sit down to eat.

More importantly one is struck by the development of characters in films of Quan’an Wang. All the adults are loving and giving. While young, each character looks at the best option to survive and make a good living. But as they age, the characters mature and look at ways to compensate those that they have wronged. The end of the film does leave questions for the viewer to ponder—but you leave the screening with the confidence that the young will follow the path trodden by their elders. They have learnt this lesson on the dining tables of their homes.

P.S. The Chinese films Tuya's marriage and Peacock, mentioned above, were earlier reviewed on this blog.

116. Indian filmmakers Girish Karnad and B. V. Karanth’s “Vamsha vriksha” (The Geneology Tree/The Family Tree) (1971): A major Indian cinematic work, often forgotten by Indian and global cineastes

2011-07-02T17:24:00.000-07:00

Often important movies lean on great literary works to make an impact. Girish Karnad and B.V. Karanth’s Vamsha vriksha, made in black and white on a shoestring budget, is one such example. Vamsha vriksha was based on an Indian novel written in the Kannada language. Soon after the Kannada film was made was made, it went on to win the National Award for the Best Director, the Swarna Kamal (The Golden Lotus award). Forty years down the road, this important landmark in Indian cinema is forgotten. An entire new generation of film-goers in India can hardly recall the film.

Vamsha vriksha is a tale of three generations of two Hindu families in Karnataka. It deals with Indian society’s perceptions of widowhood, motherhood, women’s emancipation, family secrets, intrigue to secure family’s assets after the death of a parent, renunciation of the family, and marital infidelity. Indian culture and societal demands of the day make the film totally riveting in the Seventies with indelible acting performances by three individuals who briefly made a name in Indian cinema as movie directors, each winning top national honors—Girish Karnad (who followed this work with another memorable directorial effort Kaadu/The forest --1973), B.V. Karanth (with his equally important film Chomana Dudi/ Chomana’s Drum--1975), and G.V. Iyer with his ambitious historical biopic in Sanskrit (a dead Indian language) titled Adi Shankaracharya (1983).

There are several reasons why Vamsha vriksha stands out today. First, the film's subject is relevant today as it was in the Seventies. It embodies many aspects of Indian society and its strong foundations built on family values. It underscores the importance of the family tree as a transmitter of those perceived values. In Vamsha vriksha, the devotion and respect of a young widow for her father-in-law and the understanding of the elder for the aspirations of his daughter-in-law convey the feelings of the emerging, evolving India with its gradual acceptance of women’s emancipation and widow remarriage. The importance of the male heir in an Indian patriarchal family is another aspect of the film Vamsha vriksha. The absence of a parent in a child’s life is yet another aspect studied through two contrasting examples in the film. And, finally, there is an unenviable choice for a young Indian Hindu widow to take--whether to deprive a loving family of their only grandson or to live with her son and new husband, bringing sorrow to her first husband’s family. The dilemmas offered in the film are not particular to Karnataka where the Kannada language is spoken but could be applicable anywhere in India or even in other parts of the sub-Continent.

Most Indian critics sideline Vamsha vriksha partly because quality Indian cinema is often associated with three languages—Bengali, Malayalam and Hindi/Urdu—and partly because the better Indian critics and scholars are more comfortable with those afore-mentioned languages. Vamsha vriksha is forgotten today because it was made in Kannada language and its main actors were the directors themselves.

For this critic, Vamsha vriksha and another Indian Golden Lotus/President’s Gold Medal winner, M.T. Vasudevan Nair’s Malayalam film called Nirmalayam (1973) are two important Indian films that have been deprived of international and national recognition in recent decades. Both discuss Indian society and its affinity to the Hindu religion as Ingmar Bergman would in his films on Swedish lifestyles and Christianity. (This critic has often compared and contrasted the ending of Nirmalayam with that of Bergman’s Winter Light--1962.) But the core strength of Vamsha vriksha comes, not from the directors or the actors, but from the Kannada novel by S. L. Bhyrappa, on which the film hangs. The novel’s name, used for its English translation, is The Uprooted.

Girish Karnad is arguably one of India’s finest playwrights ranking alongside the Hindi playwright Mohan Rakesh. Karnad could envisage how the novel could be dis-aggregated into poignant sequences to make an impact on the screen. Karnad and Karanth, like Bergman, had an affinity for the stage, but knew what cinema could achieve which the theatre could not. The last sequence in the film, one of the most evocative sequences in Indian cinema, could not have been achieved on stage—only cinema could record that. That sequence transcended tragedy as it made the viewer review all the values of Indian society. But what was more important for this critic was that final sequence could easily be considered to be parallel to the end of Shakespeare’s King Lear or Bergman’s Winter Light. Several parts of the film rely on movement of the actors, the camera angles, light and shade, rather than the spoken words. It is a remarkable directorial effort, rarely encountered in the annals of Indian cinema. It is a film that indicates a sophisticated mind behind the camera pulling together diverse visual segments that add up to more than the sum of its parts.

However, the true majesty of the film rests on the central character of the film—the patriarch of the film. He is a devout husband, a son who respects his dead father and prays for him on each death anniversary, a caring father-in-law and a doting grandfather. He is steeped in tradition and very religious. Even when his wife urges him to sleep with her handmaiden because she cannot do that for medical reasons after the first child is born, he refuses (compare and contrast it with the almost similar tale of Sarah and Abraham, in the Christian/Jewish/Islamic scriptures). What then, can lay low such a morally tall and charismatic individual?

The true hero behind the film is indeed the writer of the novel--- S L Bhyrappa. The novelist’s development of Katyayani (played by a charming Kannada actress, L.V. Sharada) who breaks free from the shackles of widowhood with tact and consideration for her late husband’s family but loses the companionship of her son, was used by the novelist as a pivot for the see-sawing tales of two families both having to weather moral turpitudes in different contexts. Shame and scandal in families, rich and poor, occur worldwide. But Bhyrappa weaved together the myriad psychological and philosophical strains that a family tree bears on its branches. The film and the novel might expose the reality under the surface of strong cultural values but they do not undermine the role of the tree preserving the cultural values for generations. For Ingmar Bergman in Winter Light, the priest continues his vocation at the end of the film following his personal social and religious turmoil. For Bhyrappa, Karnad and Karanth, in Vamsha vriksha, the family tree does not get uprooted---a grandson following his cathartic moments of losing his mother still cries out for his grandfather, although there is no response. The family tree continues to serve in preserving social and cultural values through the generations.

Vamsha vriksha is one of those rare works of Indian cinema that can match international standards in content and style and can be a rewarding experience for a viewer even after the film gets over. And surprisingly, both Vamsha vriksha and Nirmalayam are two movies that rarely get mentioned in any serious discussion of Indian cinema.

P.S. Ingmar Bergman's Winter Light was reviewed on this blog earlier.

115. Russian director Aleksei Popogrebsky’s film “Kak ya provyol etim letom” (How I Ended This Summer) (2010): Psychological cinematic perspectives on old vs. new, and duty vs. freedom

2011-06-18T09:56:00.000-07:00

For the entire duration of this captivating film that won the Golden Hugo at the Chicago Film Festival and the Best Film award at the London Film Festival, the viewer sees merely two individuals, one young (Pavel) and the other (Sergei) much older, old enough to be the other one’s father. Both are living on a remote island inhabited perhaps by polar bears and nothing else. Then you don’t get to see the bears (except once), you only hear conversations between the two men about bears. One is a university student, the other a meteorologist. The only other human beings that intrude the script are the voice of a man on the mainland who keeps in touch with the denizens over a fragile radio wavelength. The conversation on the radio link is often limited to transmitting scientific data that seems to include meteorological data as well as radioactivity captured on a Geiger counter.

Director Popogrebsky presents a film that first engages you visually. Popogrebsky’s two major collaborators on this film, as on his earlier film Simple Things, are the cinematographer Pavel Kostomarov (winning a Silver Bear for this film at Berlin Film Festival 2010 and the Golden Eagle in Russia) and composer of music, Dimitry Katkhanov. You first see the sea and the land and you marvel at the natural beauty of the landscape, goaded along aurally by the music on the soundtrack. Then the director shows you rusty contraptions that are buzzing, emitting sufficient radioactivity to make a Geiger counter come alive to produce frenetic, rapid clicks. No words are spoken but the message is gently conveyed—you, the viewer, are being introduced from beauty to ugliness. Later you are shown fields full of old jerry cans that contain liquid fuel, also rusting, all left behind years ago—a graveyard of junk that had once served many people in the past. But where are those people? The people who erected the radioactive contraptions, the sheds, the few buildings, where are they? And why is a young university student carrying a Geiger counter, while listening to rock music? You are introduced to images that remind you of the dead terrain of Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker. If you think the connection is outrageous, you will see the video game played by the young man is also called STALKER.

Popogrebsky has made the film using his own script and is evidently influenced by Tarkovsky. He presents a tale of confrontation between two individuals who come together by fate on this lonely yet lovely corner of the world. The viewer is introduced gradually to a father-son relationship though the two are not related. You note that the old man belongs to the old school who believes in gathering and transmitting the facile data to a faceless recipient, miles away. The young man has his clear order of priorities--music, video games, sleep and lower on the priority rung, gathering and transmitting correct data. You anticipate confrontation between the flag of freedom and the flag of rules. Instead you see teacher-student, a father-son relationship that appears to develop, even though in the old school the elders taught the young using fear tactics to keep the young ones in check. It is easy for the viewer to note that the young man has a growing respect for the elder, who has a wife and child. You feel director Popogrebsky is now treading close to Andrei Zvyaginstev’s cinema (The Return).

But the psychologist in Popogrebsky surfaces later. The young man learns from a radio message that the old man’s wife and child are killed but for a strange reason does not convey the information immediately to the elder man. Why is that? Is he afraid of causing misery to a man who had gone fishing trout to salt and take that precious catch to his wife and child as a gift? Or is it that the old man has been tough with him?

The delay in revealing the facts and the eventual transmission of the vital information leads to events that provide a thriller element to the essentially psychological tale. But the film is able to go beyond the level of a thriller—a tale of an old man who was provided delayed information on the death of his loved ones by a young man whom he treated as a son.

Popogrebsky falls into trap of his own making. The script is written as from the viewpoint of the young man. Within that scope, the story unfolds from the perspective of the young and not of the elder individual. In case Popogrebsky had not resorted to this format and had presented the story as a third person’s view of the tale, it is possible the movie would have had a different impact on the viewer. Tarkovsky adopted such a perspective in his last film, The Sacrifice, where the film is from the father’s point of view while Zvyagintsev attempted it with a flourish in The Return, where the entire story was from the elder son’s point of view. But unfortunately Popogrebsky avoids extensive analysis of the narrator, a flaw that is not so obvious in Tarkovsky and Zvyaginstsev. But all three films/directors were dealing with similar themes: old vs. new, father vs. son, political allegories, etc. While Popogrebsky is able to convey the dark message of radiation poisoning, the final sacrifice of the elder for the younger and end the film with visual optimistic message of a dark sky becoming bright, the focus of the film is turned at the end toward the elder of the duo.

The captivating film ends with the narrator in a position to write a university paper on how he spent his summer on an island with an elderly man. Is the old man psychologically unstable or is he a very wise old man capable of making decisions the import of which dawns on others much later? It even tends to glorify the lonely, elderly widower slowly dying of radiation on an isolated island. What Popogrebsky, the psychologist, does to the viewer is to make viewer think why young people refrain from doing certain actions. Is it fear? Is it empathy? Is it love? Or is it a flaw in all of us human beings that makes us stumble at a critical point in our lives?

However, if you want to enjoy the film at a different level replace the young man with modern Russia and the elder with the erstwhile Soviet Union, and ask yourself the same questions. The radioactive, rusty machines could then appear meaningful for the viewer than a mere art director's prop. This is precisely where both Popogrebsky's film How I Ended This Summer and Zvyagintsev's The Return reach a point of confluence.

While Popogrebsky may not be of the same class as Tarkovsky or Zvyagintsev, there is no denying that he is a notable Russian director. Evidently he has a tremendous verve in dealing with actors: both his actors in this film won a Silver Bear each for acting at the Berlin Film Festival—a rare achievement. And Popogrebsky had done this before, as the actor in his previous feature film Simple Things also won best actor awards at two festivals. I do hope that Popogrebsky’s next work improves on this one—he is younger than Zvyagintsev--while continues to work with cameraman Kostomarov and composer Kastkhanov. They make a great team behind the camera.

P.S. Andrei Zvyagintsev's The Return was reviewed earlier on this blog.

114. Thai director Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s “Loong Boonmee raleuk chat” (Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives) (2010): Layers of freewheeling thoughts that include philosophy, nature, politics, and life’s contradictions, crossing borders of time, life and death, illusion and reality

2011-05-21T05:43:00.000-07:00

Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives is no ordinary movie. It contains a mix of age old wisdom and modern politics, the latter hidden cleverly to avoid the wrath of the Thai censors. It presents Buddhist concepts where the religion exhorts the believer to choose non-violence and abstain from killing living things. In another dimension, the movie is also an ode to nature and the Asian belief in cyclical reincarnation of souls in different life forms over time. In yet another dimension, it is also a film that often connects and refers to a region in Thailand called Nabua that had seen violent rule by Thai armed forces for three decades in the Sixties, Seventies and Eighties. It is most of all, a modern film that recalls the grammar of a Terrence Mallick film with long segments of silence where the only sounds that punctuate deadpan but ponderous statements are those of insects and birds.

And when statements are spoken in Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives, they invite you to reflect on its meaning. The lead character Uncle Boonmee is a former farmer, a former soldier, a raconteur, a widower, a father, a brother and an uncle, who knows that he is dying from a kidney disease and that his days are numbered. Lying on a bed in rural Thailand, the old man Boonmee talks of killing larvae pests on a tamarind tree, and shortly afterwards there is a conversation on conserving the life of bees while collecting and consuming the honey. There is a contradiction in attitudes here, to kill living things or no to kill. It is this duality in life the film explores at various stages of the movie. Mallick in his film The Thin Red Line (1998) asked a somewhat related rhetoric question to the viewer: “What’s this war in the heart of nature?” Both films are examples of mature cinema that has transcended conventional box office demands and invites the viewer to a new level of cinematic experience.

An early segment of Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives presents an intriguing shot of a Thai buffalo tied with a rope. The buffalo breaks free by brute strength and wanders into a forest and we see the animal lost in the forest without any clue to what it should do next. But the viewer also sees the faints shapes of simian “ghosts” in the forest watching the entry of the buffalo. The sequence can be best understood, if we recall the opening quote of this Thai film: "Facing the jungle, the hills and vales, my past lives as an animal and other beings rise up before me." The life of Boonmee and the buffalo are interlinked: in cinema and in time as a key to open the chest of enigmatic visuals that follow.

Mallick in his The Thin Red Line had included a similar opening sequence of an alligator that is capable of devouring human beings sliding into water majestically in a forest only to be shown, towards the end of that film, dead and strung up by soldiers as their food. Both sequences in the two related films might confuse many in the audience but both directors are talking about nature and the larger equation of nature with us, human beings. It is this somewhat similar duality or contradiction in life that the Thai director presents in the epilogue of Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives in which a Buddhist monk who has vowed to give up all comforts for his religion yearns to have a shower and goes to a karaoke bar, while his close family are glued to a TV channel showing inane activities of the Thai army.

I do not know how much of the wisdom of the Thai film can be attributed to the Thai director Apichatpong Weerasethakul and how much to the senior Buddhist monk Phra Sripariyattiwetti's 1983 book, “A Man Who Can Recall Past Lives, Uncle Boonmee” on which the movie is loosely based. But one thing is certain: the film is not just about philosophy and religion but one equally on contemporary Thai politics. First, Uncle Boonmee believes that his present kidney failure has much to do with “karma”: the wages of sin, as it were, of killing too many Communists as a Thai soldier and parallel to his actions of killing pests on his farm with pesticides, as a prequel in his present life. Yet his sister and nephew re-assure him that he did all that for “the sake of his country.” Later in the film there is a comment that underscores the political message: “When the authorities found past people they shone a light at them. That light projected images of them onto a screen… When those images appeared, the past people disappeared.”

An aging, wrinkled princess finds her youthful image in a water reflection, and this brings tears to her eyes. It should because the young princess had once spurned true love from her palanquin bearer. Then a remarkable dialogue follows between the aging princess and a talking catfish. The catfish has Boonmee’s voice and is perhaps an avatar of the princess’ true lover, the palanquin bearer. The princess says of her young image: "I know that reflection is an illusion"; the catfish/Boonmee responds, "I know that you're the same person I loved"; and the princess answers, "That's an illusion too."

The film is a “ghost” film as well just as two other major films made in 2010 can be classified loosely as “ghost” films—Manoel de Oliveira’s The Strange Case of Anjelica and Alejandro Innaritu’s Biutiful. In all these three films from three different countries, the three film directors discuss interaction of the dying with ghosts (and the way immigrants are perceived by local populations). And the ghost appears to Boonmee when he has neared his time of departure from his current state. All the three movies employ the “ghosts” not to scare the viewer but to lift subject of the story to an unusual higher level while discussing family, politics, society and philosophy.

As in Biutiful, the importance of family is underscored. The very word “Uncle” is suggestive of this. The dying Boonmee is nursed with love by his sister and nephew. His dead wife appears as a ghost to thank her sister-in-law and nephew. Later in the film the dead wife appears more real and the viewer sees the husband hugging his ghost wife as she reassures her living husband that he has nothing to fear in death. In death and in life the family links are not broken. The father Boonmee yearns for his missing son’s company and a simian “ghost” with deep red eyes appears. The son has been missing for 13 years and had evidently taken to Communist ideology (are the red eyes a link or is the missing link the statement of mating with monkey ghosts?). The film provides reassurance for the dying because of the permanence of love exuding both from the dead and living. A poignant remark from a ghost (his wife) to the living Boonmee is “ghosts don't associate with places, they associate with people. We'll find each other.” The entire film indirectly deals with the struggle for freedom to move and migrate from the buffalo seeking freedom from its rope, to Boonmee wondering if he would ever be able to find his dead wife after death, to the Laotian workers who migrate to Thailand for a better life and yet do not find the respect they deserve, of a princess on a journey, the urban Thai seeking answers in the rural Thailand's forests and caves.

The interesting Thai film is structured in at least five segments that do not appear connected but if one cares to reflect on the film, its segments have a whole larger than the sum of its parts. The first segment deals with the buffalo, the kidney care in a makeshift hospital, and a road drive. The second deals with ghosts interacting with Boonmee and family. The third segment deals with conversation at the tamarind farm. The fourth deals with a princess and a talking catfish that transports you into the past. (It is possible, if we go by voice association, that Boonmee is the catfish in a previous life rather than the princess.) The fifth segment deals with a "magical" cave in the forest and death of Boonmee, somewhat reminiscent of Tarkovsky’s Stalker’s tunnel sequence. The sixth segment is an epilogue devoted to activity of a Buddhist monk who seeks material comforts of a shower and a Karaoke bar.

The following statement of the director Apichatpong Weerasethakul made in his “Cinema Scope” interview is revealing: “More than my other films, Uncle Boonmee is very much about cinema, that’s also why it’s personal. If you care to look, each reel of the film has a different style—acting style, lighting style, or cinematic references—but most of them reflect movies. I think that when you make a film about recollection and death, you have to consider that cinema is also dying—at least this kind of old cinema that nobody makes anymore.” It is perhaps this reason why I found Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives a lot more satisfying and meaningful than his earlier more celebrated works Syndromes and a Century and Blissfully Yours. Not having read the book on “Uncle Boonmee,” I do not know what percentage of the kudos need to go to the writer of the book and what percentage to the director of the film. All I can say is that I loved to watch Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives while I do not rate two of his afore-mentioned works that high. What I found so meaningful about the film is what the director himself stated in an interview to Bangkok Post: “Uncle Boonmee is a film about transformation, about objects and people that transform or hybridise. You can explain with scientific belief that nothing exists, nothing is really solid and everything is just a moving particle.”

While watching the credits I was surprised and encouraged to find Hollywood actor Danny Glover was an associate producer of this Thai film. I am convinced that understanding this film would require multiple viewings—but one thing I am convinced it is truly an intelligent and rewarding film experience that approaches the cinematic level of Tarkovsky’s and Mallick’s cinema. I am delighted that the Cannes jury recognized its merits and rewarded it with the Gold Palm prize in 2010, just as I am not surprised that another international jury--that of the International Film Festival of India held in Goa in the same year did not find it deserving of any award. At the Oscars too it did not make the final shortlist of five nominees for the best foreign film. Subsequently, this movie went on to win the best Asian film at the Asian Film Festival, 2011. One man's meat is truly another man’s poison.

P.S. The films Biutiful, The Strange Case of Anjelica and The Thin Red Line have been reviewed earlier on this blog.

113. Centenarian Portuguese filmmaker Manoel de Oliveira’s “O Estranho Caso de Angelica” (The Strange Case of Angelica) (2010): Mixing illusion and reality with the mystery of life and death

2011-05-02T11:26:00.000-07:00

One is never sure if any hundred year old can walk or even talk coherently. When you see a feature film made by a '102+ '-year-old that can make the grade to enter the 2010 Cannes official Un certain regard section, your jaws drop. The 102 or 103 year old Manoel de Oliveira’s reported physical handicaps are limited to walking with the aid of a stick and a minor hearing problem and, believe it or not, is busy making another movie after the recent The Strange Case of Angelica.

The Strange Case of Angelica is indeed a ghost story but to classify it merely as one would be missing the wood for the trees. If one is looking for a good ghost story movie, one ought to see The Others or Yella, not this one. If one is looking for special effects associated with ghost stories, this is far from one that can be recommended. It is definitely not a commercial film: it is merely a film that can make you think. It provides a cinematic repast for an audience that is able to look beyond the decades-old technicalities that would annoy the impatient, modern hi-tech cineaste. Rather than a typical ghost story, this movie is all about capturing the ephemeral beauty of this world of fleeting moments of Joycean epiphanies on film, if you will, for posterity,

Director de Oliviera is probably one of the very few film directors from the silent film era still making movies in the 21st century. He has made some 60 films in the past 80 years. But what is most remarkable is that his films have a certain transcendental quality, often imperceptible to many. The Strange Case of Angelica is a tale written by de Oliveira in 1952, a half century ago for the screen but only executed today. And therefore the purist would find contradictions in the conversations in the film on global warming that are anachronistic for a film that is set in the Fifties. But then this is a sensitive tale from a man who loves cinema, photography, and sound. Had de Oliveira made this film 50 years ago, I am very sure that the mature philosophical turn of the final product would have been missing. It takes a very old man who has lived through life’s many twists and turns to make a film like this one.

The Strange Case of Angelica is about a still photographer—the starting point of any one who loves cinema. The photographer is different, he eats little, he loves the radio, he is an introvert, and is a person trying to catch the elusive beauty of actions being erased by time. The photographer spends hours trying to capture for future generations the feel of a chain of farmers preparing a farm field to grow another crop while of all of them sing a chorus that provide a hypnotic rhythm for the actions of the group. Much later in the film, the photographer revisits the same spot and finds to his dismay the field preparation has been replaced by a clunky tractor—gone are the men and the song. Even though the camera of the photographer has captured the visual beauty, it is cinema that captures the sounds that will be lost in time. Cinema and photography can make time stand still by illusion. That is the precise beauty of the de Oliveira film.

The movie is somewhat autobiographical—de Oliveira was a farmer and obviously realizes that his days on earth are numbered. The photographer in the film is an extension of de Oliveira, the film director (in fact the actor is his real life grandson). Are the hoes in the hands of the farmers a subtle image of the grim reaper for an old man? The film is evidently a poem on the magic that you can find through the view finder capturing the elusive image that you wish can stay with you forever. Here in this film it is a moment of magic realism where a dead woman comes alive through the viewfinder. So is the image of the farmers. So is the bird in a cage.

The Strange Case of Angelica is much more than a tale of a dead woman coming alive in the mind of a young man. It is ostensibly a love story of two individuals who have never met in life, but is destined to meet and be together after death. The beauty of life and death is what this film captures through some amazing sequences. One such sequence in the film is of a cat staring at a bird in a cage, considering the prospect of the bird as its next meal. The cat’s delicious thoughts are hoed down by a dog’s bark—the cat soon realizes that it has to save its own skin. Another amazing bit of conversation in the film relates to a pet bird being fed the remains of an egg and the surprising death of the bird that results from the innocent action.

The film has much to do with philosophy—the opening quote in the film that I do not now fully recollect, had something to link time standing still and God in us. It is not without relevance that a trivial conversation within the film set in 1952 discusses “anti-matter searching for the precise opposite.” For the record the film’s tale revolves around a Jew in post-Second World War Catholic Portugal. A Jew encounters death of a Christian woman and a Jew deals with a photographic death and resurrection following visits to a Church. There is even a passing out in an olive grove. (Much of de Oliveira’s cinema contains suggestive Christian motifs for those familiar with Biblical passages.) The soul departs leaving the body behind. These are interesting images, not statements, in the film. Statements from the film have to be viewed in the context of visuals and sound.

This film has much for a viewer to reflect on. And film is not just a visual crossword puzzle to solve. It has an aural puzzle as well. The Chopin selection and application in the film needs attention. As the credits roll, you hear the very same chorus of the farmers that so fascinated the photographer earlier in the film. That’s de Oliveira’s nudge on the importance of sound that has a magic realism of its own. The bird in the cage flutters when death takes place elsewhere in the room. As the landlady closes the windows and draws the curtains to underscore death, you begin to reflect on this strange film that mixes hallucination, science, music and philosophy. It is a sensitive, delicate film that is unlikely to be appreciated by the conventional filmgoer who prefers a cut-and-dry tale. If you relish the film you will realize that this film could not have been made by a young person. Beyond the lack of modern craftsmanship lies a deep tale of mystery and philosophy rejecting modern machines (loud impersonal efficient farm machinery for one) and modern photography, all the while celebrating a mystical charm of the old world.

P.S. The German ghost film Yella was reviewed earlier on this blog.

112. Danish director Susanne Bier’s “Hævnen” (In a Better World) (2010): The importance of parents revisited in the contemporary world scenario

2011-01-27T01:08:00.000-08:00

“Surprisingly endearing and thought-provoking” is what I consider Susanne Bier’s Hævnen (In a Better World) to be. To appreciate this Bier offering adequately, it might be useful to note that the lady belongs to “Dogme 95” group—a group of prominent Danish filmmakers who vowed in 1995 to make films utilizing traditional values of story, acting, and theme, excluding special effects or technology. Some prominent members of this group include directors Lars von Trier and Thomas Vinterberg.

Some directors leave you cold when you see a particular movie they made. The first film of Ms Bier that I had seen—an earlier work called After the Wedding--left me rather unimpressed. The film had dealt with orphans in India and a father-daughter relationship in Europe that was at best interesting but not convincing enough to make me sit up and take note of either the lady behind the camera or of the scriptwriter. It remains for me a convoluted, predictable and unconvincing movie.

Now, why do I describe In a Better World to be a “surprisingly, endearing film?” I do not consider Susanne Bier’s preceding work After the Wedding to be either significant or to be a work of a promising director. Therefore, it was a pleasant surprise for me that in the very next film In a Better World, Ms. Bier has so much more to offer for the viewer in every department of filmmaking that you begin to wonder if it is indeed the very same team of Bier and scriptwriter Anders Thomas Jensen behind the film you are watching. I am not surprised the film In a Better World won the Golden Globe for the best Foreign Film and the best director Silver Peacock at the Indian International Film Festival in Goa. This film deserved those honours, even if the film is simplistic enough to fall in line with the Dogme 95 values.

It is amusing to note that the Bier-Jensen team actually has reworked on the very same theme offered in After the Wedding only to remodel it afresh in In a Better World. Both films offer thought provoking comparisons of parallel relationships on two continents (this time Europe vs Africa, replacing Europe vs Asia/India in the earlier film). Instead of dealing with the father-daughter interactions of the earlier film, the Bier-Jensen team devolves the interactions to two sets of fragile father-son relationships. The other less-important parent in both films hover in the background and are never fleshed out by Jensen. You would expect the cocktail not to work when it is shaken as it was in the earlier film, but it somehow works wonders when the cocktail is stirred, rather than shaken, by the duo in the second film. While the main parent-child relationship is discussed threadbare in the European context in both the films, the viewer is also provided a connected inter-continental relationship of love and philanthropic social work involving one of the European parents in the first equation.

I have been trying to figure out for over a month why I liked Bier’s In a Better World so much when I was left nonplussed by After the Wedding. One possible reason is that I could easily identify myself with the incredibly real characters of the two 10-year old or so schoolboys and the peer pressure to agree to do certain morally wrong actions because you value more the friendships that you develop in school than ethics that you have adopted during your upbringing. Another possible reason I liked the film was the Gandhian parent who taught his children to develop moral strength rather than give in to bullies. A third reason was the underscoring of the effect of the absence of a mother on a growing child. A fourth possible reason I loved the film was the suggestion that seeds of terrorism can be easily be sown in the minds of youngsters when parents are separating or divorcing. A fifth likely reason was the awesome screen presence of the actor Mikael Presbrandt as the Gandhian father and a surgeon, who spends time in Africa providing medical care for victims of civil strife in an unspecified country, putting his Hippocratic oath above all other values and his conscience—at least for some time.

In a Better World lifts up a simple tale of two schoolboys, essentially having good moral values, who are both missing their respective mothers, deteriorate into modern terrorists or young vigilantes. The power of the film does not lie in the story line—it is undeniably a simple, predictable one. The power of the film lies in default by what the film suggests to the viewer by presenting the simple tale. Do “caring” parents really care for their children? Are the parents there during critical moments when they are needed the most?

One of the reasons for In a Better World to work magic was the Bier/Jensen effort to concentrate a lot more on the thoughts and actions of the growing-up children more than the adults in the film. There are so many sequences in the film that remind one of the 2003 Russian masterpiece Andrei Zvyagintsev’s The Return (dangers of heights, troubled youngsters who find solace in retreating to dangerous and isolated places, the father-son relationship). In the earlier Bier/Jensen film, the focus was on the adults and the lack of a complete childhood. However, the adult characters in In a Better World are equally developed even though the African segment is unbelievably predictable and clichéd, even though similar African warlords have dotted the African map in recent decades.

The Bier/Jensen treatise on relationships works this time around because it connects relationships with seeds that sow terrorism. The treatise worked even more because it seemed to promote Gandhian values. It works because it underscores the importance of parenting over philanthropic social work. The movie seems to scream “Look after the emotional needs of your family before you go out to help others in distant lands.” When a child needs his father most of all to talk, the father is too involved and tired by his well-meaning actions in a physically distant world. These are real scenarios today, and that is the key to the success of this film. All the elements of the film are real and that is what makes the film connect with the viewer. Perhaps Jensen ought to be complimented for his wonderful screenplay. The film has an optimistic ending though the English title suggests an element of doubt and presents a pessimistic nuance. The film does leave the audience yearning for a "better world" for all youngsters growing up today in this complex but interconnected global village.

Susanne Bier, as the director, needs to be complimented for the superb convincing performances she has elicited first from Mikael Persbrandt, as the surgeon and father of the one of the boys, and then the two boys Elias (Markus Rygaard) and Christian (William Nielsen) that recall similar performances of young actors in certain films of François Truffaut and Louis Malle. Bier needs to be eqully complimented for her choice of locations that add to the veracity of the tale.

For viewers who value cinema that concentrate on “story, acting and theme” as the Dogme 95 group projects, In a Better World is a great film to watch and enjoy. The film having won the Golden Globe is now in the Oscar race, once again competing against the remarkable Mexican/Spanish film Biutiful. (And do the two films have a common link? Yes, both deal with parenting! And both have mesmerizing performances by the respective lead actors.) If the viewer goes solely by traditional filmmaking that the Dogme group propounds, then the Bier film would pip the Mexican/Spanish film to win the foreign film Oscar. However, if you step out of the Dogme world, Biutiful deserves the Oscar.

In a Better World, apart from the accolades mentioned above, also won the Grand jury award at the Rome International Film Festival, the Thessaloniki film festival's audience award, Best male actor for Mikael Presbrandt at the Tallinn Tarta Black Nights festival, Best Director and Best Screenplay at the Sevilla Film festival.

P.S. The Mexican/Spanish film Biutiful and the Russian film The Return have been reviewed on this blog earlier.

111. Turkish director Semih Kaplanoğlu’s “Bal” (Honey) (2010): Joseph and Jacob relationship revisited in a contemporary scenario

2011-01-14T17:01:00.000-08:00

Turkish cinema is on the march. Decades after Yilmaz Guney’s Turkish films made an impact on the minds of connoisseurs of the finest in world cinema, came the formidable Turkish director Nuri Bilge Ceylan and the less impressive but yet notable Abdullah Oguz. And now we have a new Turkish director Semih Kaplanoğlu who can match Ceylan’s sophistication in a different way. Semih Kaplanoğlu’s Bal (Honey) is an unusual film in many ways—it has no music at all, it grabs your senses by focusing on natural sounds and sights, indoors and outdoors. It is different.

To appreciate Bal beyond the obvious sights and sounds, one has to be well read on the theological tale of Joseph and Jacob (or Yusuf and Yakub) common to three great religions of the world—Christianity, Islam and Judaism. The intricate relationship of father, son and God/Allah, paves the way for the “spiritual realism” of Semih Kaplanoğlu’s cinema.

The story of Bal appears to be simple, but it is not so simple. It is a tale of Yusuf (read Joseph), a young boy, with a narrative structure that uses an Islamic perspective. Like the Joseph of the Bible, Yusuf dreams, and shares them with his father Yakup/Yakub (read Jacob). Yusuf/Joseph is an interpreter of dreams. Yakub/Jacob advises his son in the film Bal/Honey never to share his dreams with others. To understand the importance of this seemingly innocuous statement the viewer has to be familiar with the religious books of any of the three religions. When Yakub dies (the death of Yakub is captured cinematically in way that is reminiscent of death captured in Iñárritu’s Biutiful, both films made in 2010, amidst visual references to tall trees and metaphors of unusual birds, owls in one, hawks in the other), his son Yusuf stops speaking and searches for his father on his own using his dreams as clues. The intense but silent bonding between father and son (a superb performance by child actor Bora Atlas) is amazingly and sensitively captured in Bal, again recalling a similar bonding of a father and his children in Iñárritu’s Biutiful. All elements of the film comes together seamlessly because Kaplanoğlu is the co-screeplaywriter and co-editor as well.

This notable and uplifting Turkish film, set in the Black Sea region of the country, is an odd film if seen from a conventional movie viewer’s perspective. It is the third and final film of director Semih Kaplanoğlu’s Yusuf trilogy—three films named after Yusuf the lead and part-autobiographical character in all the three films somewhat like the Apu trilogy of Satyajit Ray. The three films are called Süt (Milk), Yumurta (Egg), and Bal (Honey). Odd names indeed to describe the life stages of a human being! But wait the oddest bit is that one would expect the three films to be chronological segments: first of the child (and the death of his father), the second of the coming of age of young man struggling to be a poet, and the third segment on the established adult poet (and the death of his mother). But for director Kaplanoğlu that does not work: his three films are not presented in chronological order.

The last film in the trilogy Bal (Honey) is all about the child Yusuf. This film won the 2010 Golden Bear (the Grand Prize) and the Prize of the Ecumenical Jury at the prestigious Berlin Film Festival, while the earliest film Milk is about the struggling poet living with his mother, and the second film Egg is the presentation of the matured poet, whose mother dies and a new young woman enters his life. Unfortunately all this critical (and to some trivial) information is often not available to a viewer watching Bal as the first Kaplanoğlu film; I had to dig up this information from various sources to appreciate the film better. But avid filmgoers will understand this to be a familiar problem with appreciating any major trilogy whether the director is Satyajit Ray (Apu trilogy), or Krzysztof Kieslowski (Three Colors trilogy), or Grigory Kozinstsev (Maxim’s trilogy) or Ingmar Bergman (Faith trilogy). To appreciate any single film in a trilogy of a good director, one needs to see all the three films and hopefully grasp the connections. Therefore, to have seen the last segment (Bal/Honey) first, before seeing the other two was not disconcerting in the case of Kaplanoğlu as you were seeing the early years of the poet first. And what a segment that has proven to be!

Fortunately, the directors’ own statements provide many insights for the viewer to comprehend Bal further. Kaplanoğlu’s statement available on the European film awards website: “Bal is the third film in my "Yusuf trilogy." The idea of the "Yusuf trilogy" took form while I was revising a script which I had written long ago and which was more or less the story of university aged Yusuf in Süt (Milk). While I was elaborating on the character of Yusuf, I started to think about this young man's future as an adult (Yumurta/Egg) and his past as a young boy (Bal/Honey). Those ideas helped shape the trilogy. I started with Yumurta (Egg), maybe because I wanted to peel down the character slowly and reach his core. The trilogy could be considered an extensive flashback. However, they are not period films. All take place in the present day amidst various places, relations and economic standards in Turkey. I have been asked if all three Yusuf characters are indeed the same man. I choose not to answer so as not to disclose the secrets of the character, the direct and indirect relationship between the films, the mysteries to the films.”

“I drew on my own past experiences while shaping the character of Yusuf. So we can say that Yusuf has parts from me. I referred to my own youth and childhood while writing the three scripts and I believe I was able to handle the issues about Yusuf’s life, troubles and quests realistically. My own childhood served as a point of reference for the script of Bal (Honey) as well. My troubles at school while trying to learn how to read and write, my questions which grown-ups left unanswered, the intense cruelty and richness of nature... In a way, a child forms his personality while discovering the world with curiosity. An occasional misunderstanding leading to naïve mistakes, dreams, joys and sorrows allows him to reach the truth. I hope Bal (Honey) allows us to reach the truth of Yusuf.”

“For Yusuf and his father Yakup, the forest represents a fairytale place containing many mysteries at its heart. The forest is a magical realm into which they vanish and appear back again. It is no ordinary place where they walk to and from for a means of livelihood. It constitutes another world with big old trees, various mysterious creatures, like the mule and the hawk which accompanies them into the forest. It was quite difficult to find a place where there were broad and tall trees with big trunks. I tried my best to find a location both suitable for placing the hives and the visual world that I wanted to create in Bal/Honey. We worked in various forests, particularly in those where beehives have been placed for centuries. They were located 30-40 km from each other and at different heights way above sea level, and Yusuf's father Yakup is a beekeeper who gathers black hive honey, considered some of the world's finest honey and specific to the region. This therapeutic honey is the essence of an older world, untouched nature and holiest knowledge for the inhabitants of the region. It is produced by a dwindling number of beekeepers. Yakup's occupation will soon die out. This tough labour includes placing specially-made hives on tall treetops in mountainous areas. This profession is as dangerous as it is gruelling. Yusuf’s admiration of his father certainly owes something to his unconventional job. In my point of view, it has something in common with Yusuf’s future vocation -- poetry all feature many different kinds of trees.”

On the website of the Turkish Radio and Television Corporation, director Kaplanoğlu summarizes his film, “Before the trilogy I quest for answers to the questions in my head regarding myself, my life, what I’m doing here. I tried to create a perspective on the Creation by departing from a poet’s questions. Aren’t the cinema and the arts trying to get closer to the secrets of the human’s existence?”

“Those ideas helped shape the trilogy.”, Kaplanoğlu adds.

To revert to the awesome movie itself, the fine narrative is punctuated by the visit of young Yusuf to his grandmother’s house during which on a magical night he learns of the story of the Prophet Mohammad’s arrival in Mecca after climbing the Miraj (ladder) and conversing with Abraham, Moses and Jesus, after meeting Allah (God) to retell his experiences in heaven. For young Yusuf he uses clues from his dreams and the tale of Prophet Mohammad to unite with his dead father Yakup in spirit at the place he died.

Beyond the magical/spiritual realism the film Bal provides a great essay on the classical father-son relationship. In the classroom (an interesting inversion of the dense forest), young Yusuf struggles for social acceptance, sometimes with perseverance, sometimes with guile, passing off his bench mate’s homework as his own. The film is able to capture Yusuf alone in his classroom (even when the class is full of students, Yusuf is strangely alone) just as it captures Yusuf alone in the forest. Interestingly, the film underscores a factor often missing in today’s society: a child with a speaking disability gets total undiluted support from his father, building a bond that matters in life, even after the father's death. Again to truly appreciate the father-son spiritual bonding one has to study the Joseph/Jacob dyad from the religious texts that goes beyond a mere social relationship. The last shot of the film may be silent but it is one of the finest sophisticated and subtle endings in cinema’s history. Kaplanoğlu and Ceylan have truly lifted Turkish cinema to soaring new heights of quality in world cinema.

Apart from the major awards at the Berlin Film Festival 2010, Bal/Honey has won the Best Cinematography Award at the Istanbul International Festival 2010, the UNESCO award at the Asia Pacific Screen Awards for its outstanding contribution to promotion and preservation of cultural diversity through film and the best film award at the Adana International film festival.

P.S. Turkish directors Ceylan's Three Monkeys and Oguz' Mutluluk/Bliss have been reviewed earlier on this blog.

110. Mexican director and screenplay-writer Alejandro González Iñárritu’s film “Biutiful“(2010) made in Spain: Preparing for death and communicating with the dead

2010-12-24T20:58:00.000-08:00

Iñárritu gets better with each film he makes. His screenplay (with co-scriptwriters Armando Bo and Nicolas Giacobone) in Biutiful takes a quantum jump in quality from his earlier Babel. In Babel, Iñárritu toyed with global ramifications of one person’s innocent actions, often an outcome of a knee-jerk reaction due to lack of empathy and/or of sympathy. Biutiful inverts somewhat similar connections and concerns from souls connecting beyond the grave with the living approaching their own death.

While it is easy to be swayed by the riveting (Cannes Best Actor, 2010) performance of the Spanish actor Javier Bardem, the real winner in this remarkable movie for me is its writer-director Iñárritu. Biutiful is a movie that deals with people living on the fringes of urban poverty, flirting with communication with souls in their after-life. The film begins with an absolutely stunning conversation between a man about to die and a man (the father, or is it his grandfather?) who is already dead. The film essentially discusses the last days of a man who has the gift of communicating with the dead. Just as one glimpsed Iñárritu’s concern of one stranger for another in Babel, in Biutiful this empathy/sympathy is underscored in the context of approaching death. The film is also a realistic attempt of a dying man putting the remnants of his fragile family in secure hands, when he eventually has to depart from this world. It is a film in which the director/scriptwriter uses the concept of death and extra-sensory gifts of communication to really communicate with different personalities already dead. Here is a film set in Bercelona, Spain, in which a father of two kids totally dependant on him reaches out to empathize with Senegalese and Chinese immigrants in Barcelona, as much as a woman who wants to love her husband but is in no mental state to do so without sending contrary signals, all of which are an extension of the essential idea of Babel, only more refined and escalated in a spiritual context. As in Babel, there is a closure offered in Biutiful achieved by doing good for the lesser privileged and the less understood by basic human goodness in human beings however outwardly corrupt they may seem. And this goodness, Iñárritu seems to emphasize exits in the common man, often representing the negative elements in our society (involved in peddling drugs, corrupt middlemen dealing with corrupt cops, and even cheats who sell gas-based room heaters that could kill from leakages).

Biutiful is a beautiful film, simply because the title is taken from a semi-literate urban street hustler’s attempt at teaching his kid how to spell the English word “beautiful” to his Spanish offspring learning English in school. The incorrect spelling of the title reflects beautiful aspects of the 'bad" people. The film Biutiful has an awesome screenplay that seamlessly combines parenting and death. The film is all about death but after you view the film there is good likelihood that the viewer will not consider it to be so but merely see the corruption, fragile marriages, drugs, immigration and gratitude for favours rendered as the more overriding elements than death itself.

The opening sequence and the end sequence are almost the same. Dead owls, that collect a bowl of wool, are discussed. Death is captured by sound and a blank screen. Uxbal (Javier Bardem) earns from the dead—he has the uncanny ability to converse with the recently dead—and helps the souls of the dead pass on un-communicated messages to the living.

Like director Carlos (Silent Light) Reygadas, Iñárritu is an amazing modern cinematic talent from Mexico. Iñárritu’s forte is to link various subtexts of life in a larger mosaic of life that is positive and giving, not destructive and revengeful. There are contradictions that the movie throws up: good people can get killed (e.g., the Chinese lady who baby-sits Uxbal’s kids, Uxbal’s wife who loves her husband but sleeps with his brother).

In Biutiful, a dead kid wants to set right the wrong notion with his parents about a stolen watch. In the same film, the bad conscience of Uxbal prevents his communicating with the recently dead Chinese woman and child, who were his well-wishers. A Senegalese immigrant could walk out on her benefactor Uxbal and return to Senegal with a wad of cash but prefers to stay back and thank her benefactor by taking care of his kids. None of the characters are essentially good “individuals” or heroes of our society, yet Uxbals of any society mean well and are silent heroes in their own limited space. That is the irony captured by the misspelled title.

Biutiful is a tale of generations: Uxbal and his father/grandfather, Uxbal and his children, the Senegalese couple and their child, the Chinese woman and her child, and a dead Barcelona kid and his parents. It is also a tale of a man realizing his role in a limited canvas of history in the winter of his life (literally at a snowy locale). The movie is dark but an uplifting undertone reflecting the goodness in most of us.

Biutiful proves Iñárritu is convinced of the larger cosmic plan in a seemingly chaotic world. Biutiful is not about rational abilities and actions of Uxbal, but then what is rational about any one of us? Can one really deny that communicating with the dead is impossible? The string music of Gustavo Santaolalla (Director Michael Mann, who has a great taste for music, used Santaolalla's music in Collateral) often emphasizes the irony that the script offers. Here is a film that unlike Babel is able to flesh out the main lead character, provide great music and offer tale that you can reflect on even after the film has stopped rolling. And more interestingly as a director he has an interesting and arresting way of depicting death—not very much removed from a somewhat similar depiction of death by director Semih Kaplanoglu from Turkey in another remarkable movie made this very year called Bal (Honey) that won the 2010 Golden Bear at Berlin. Both Bal and Biutiful are spellbinding films of 2010. The world is indeed small and interconnected.

P.S. Iñárritu’s Babel and Reygadas' Silent Light have been reviewed on this blog earlier.

109. Russian director Aleksei Fedorchenko’s “Ovsyanki” (Silent Souls) (2010): A requiem on love, death, birds, water, and our past

2010-12-19T05:17:00.000-08:00

Good Russian cinema has always gripped me like no other; Kozintsev, Tarkovsky, Paradjanov, Mikhalkov-Konchalovsky and Zvyaginstsev are imprinted in my mind’s eye and ears. And then along comes another, a certain Aleksei Fedorchenko. His Silent Souls happens to be his third feature length film, which recently picked up the Venice award for best photography. (Venice could claim to have introduced him to the wider cinematic world when his debut film First on the Moon won a significant award at that festival). Russian cinema often suggests that melancholia can be appealing if dealt with intelligence that Silent Souls proves as did works of the afore-mentioned Russian/Soviet filmmakers. And the camerawork of Venice award-winning cinematographer Mikhail Krichman remind you of the lensing of Jonas Gritsius, Kozintsev’s cameraman. It is not surprising to find Krichman was the cinematographer of Zvyagintsev’s two feature films. Small world, this world of good Russian cinema! Krichman also bagged the prestigious Plus Camerimage award for 2010 for the work in Silent Souls. Silent Souls also won the Black Pearl award for the Best Narrative film at the Abu Dhabi film festival.

Silent Souls is an amazing and complex work of cinema. Fedorchenko has made a film based on the novella/short-story called The Buntings, by Aist Sergeyev, with a screenplay by Denis Osokin adapting Sergeyev’s work. The main character in the film/story is also named Aist, obviously the alter ego of the novelist, who narrates the tale. The narration begins by self-introduction--the narrator is a Merjan, a 400 year old Finno-Ugric tribe in North-West Russia. His dead father was a poet--'He was a queer fish, that self-taught Merjan poet.' The narrator says the Merjans don’t talk much—much of the real “talking” in the film is done by the camera and the imaginative direction, not the actors.

Two essential elements of cinema lurk in the screenplay: the camera and the written word. Aist, the narrator, is a photographer. Early in the film interesting Russian faces smile into Aist’s lens as he directs them to smile or tilt their faces. Is he a ladies’ man? Aist has no family but has gifted a trinket to his best friend’s wife. Much later into the film Aist recollects his father, the self-taught Merjan poet, throwing his most prized possession a typewriter into a semi-frozen river. The only song in the film is sung by an admirable choir and we are told it is a song written by a local Merjan poet. The story/screenplay/direction nudges the viewer to the unwritten tale of the Merjan nation underneath the obvious tale. Most interesting trivia for me was the dedication of the film: not to the father of the director or screenplay-writer but to the father of the original story writer (who probably in real life threw his typewriter into the water!).

The only relationships discussed in the film relate to son and father (so much akin to Zvyagintsev’s The Return), women are objects of pleasure (as wife, illicit lover, and prostitute) and memory (to be captured on still film, as well). Aist the writer has called his story “The Buntings”, birds of the sparrow family. We are shown two buntings in a cage which accompany the two main characters on their journey. One would have assumed the suggested parallels are between Aist, the narrator, and the widower Miron. When you sell a pair of buntings, it is often a pair of birds of the opposite sexes. The parallel suggested by Aist the story-writer relates to Miron and his dead wife, Tanya.

Male-dominated as it may seem, the film is paean of a man for his dead wife, an object of love even in death. He is so broken in spirit that he rushes out of his car in remorse to kick a birch tree. Director Fedorchenko stated in his press conference at the Venice film festival: “The slogan of the film was tenderness. We wanted tenderness to be transformed into nostalgia; tenderness and nostalgia were to become synonymous with love. This feeling, this representation of the Merjan, was something we felt the whole time we were staying in that region. Also the names of the rivers bring us back to the Merjan people, and the expression on the women’s faces us reminds us of that people, that there was something different. We wanted to recreate this world that didn’t exist any longer, but was constantly present with us.”

But to assess this film further one has to shift gears. The film transcends love. It grapples with death and “water” (read nature) as major belief of the Merjan community. Merjans believe that all souls live in the flowing waters. Flowing water is as holy for the Merjan as the river Ganges to the Hindus. And believe it or not, the two communities separated by a continent believe in cremating their dead and collecting the burnt remains and consigning those remains to the flowing waters. Even the wedding ring worn by the husband is thrown into the water. Amazing that two communities so distant believe in the same rituals. Aist, the narrator, states “Our cemeteries are almost empty, only the young are buried there.” The incredible end of the film has the husband and wife meeting in the waters of the river, while another son, father, mother and the poet’s typewriter all meet in the sacred river. The narrator mentions he now writes on the “fish’s bodies.” Of course the narrator is speaking from a watery grave. Meanwhile, the end credits show Merjan couples locking locks on bridges and throwing the keys into the river. The everlasting Merjan story seems to continue to be associated with rivers over generations.

Death is another key element in this movie. Miron’s wife Tanya is dead early in the film. The Merjan rituals of preparing the dead for their last journey take up a chunk of the film. The journey to the river to consign the dead to flames and the waters of the river provides opportunity for “smoking.” “Smoking,” for the Merjans, is when intimate details of the dead are revealed to close friends to facilitate emotional release for the bereaved, a rough parallel with the Irish “wake.”

A conversation on immortality leads to the buntings falling silent in the car. Just as Hitchcock’s birds in his famous film The Birds become ominously silent before tragedy unfolds so do Fedorchenko’s buntings fall silent. But the image of a large bunting-like bird capable of smashing a windshield transforms the sequence into a dreamlike imagery from the realistic body that make up the rest of the movie. But surprisingly, the brief change in style fits into the scheme of the narration, as more facts are revealed by the narrator.

Silent Souls provides much to ponder about right from the first shot of the narrator with his cycle on a pontoon bridge to the final shot when the viewer realizes the true identity of Aist the narrator. Is it only love that gives meaning to life, as Aist, the narrator states, as he wishes he could live forever? But if you reflect, those are meaningless words as Aist has no family or friends, only the two buntings are his “family” apart from Miron his best friend who Aist has cheated in love. But then for the Merjans everlasting love has its abode in the flowing waters. The past and present merge as the narrator is not a hero but someone that resembles a chorus in a Greek tragedy. So do love and the flowing waters merge for the Merjans in the epilogue as the end-credits roll.

Fedorchenko may not be the finest Russian filmmaker alive, but he is definitely immensely talented and worthy of following closely.

P.S. Andrei Zvyagintsev's The Return and The Banishment with Mikhail Krichman as cinematographer have been reviewed earlier on this blog.

108. Iranian screenplay-writer and director Majid Majidi’s film “Baran” (Rain) (2001): A Sufi take on the mosaic of Iran

2010-12-09T09:15:00.000-08:00

Many would assess and dismiss this delicate Iranian feature film as an interestingly made love story between a young Iranian man and an Afghan woman refugee in Iran,or even as interesting cinematic tale where the woman lead actor does not speak a word. However, the film communicates much more than a regular love saga. Baran won the the Grand Prix of the Americas at the 2001 Montreal Film Festival and the Freedom of Expression Award of the US National Board of Review.

The story of Baran, the film, is a based on a delectable screenplay conceived by the director himself. First, the name Baran is the name of the young Afghan lady in the film and Baran also means “rain.” So big deal, one would say. But rain is the ultimate scenario for the final sequence of this Majidi movie. Again rain might not mean much to a casual viewer of this film. Majidi, the screenplay writer, has deliberately chosen the word Baran to link the two elements of the movie, the human and the natural.

Many would assume the principal subject of the film to be the female protagonist Baran. Yet Majidi surprises the viewer by a clever inversion of the subject—the film turns out to be a tale about the man who falls in love with Baran rather than Baran herself. The film traces the gradual change in the male character before and after falling in love with the girl. Once in love, Lateef the young Azeri Iranian evolves from the cheeky young fighter-cock constantly conscious of the importance of accumulating savings at each opportunity, to an individual who slowly transforms into an ascetic giving up all his wealth and the costly identity papers for his love’s family who needs those items of “pelf” more than him. Lateef in love is a transformed individual, he doesn’t chase away birds but feeds them. This is close to the Sufi ideals that one needs to adopt in life to be “united/aligned with the Beloved/Divine forces.” Somewhere near the middle of the film a troubled Lateef encounters an Afghan shoemaker with a "Rumi-like" visage who says the enigmatic words “From the hot fire of being apart, Comes the flame that burns the heart.” Probably these lines are from the Sufi poet Rumi, I do not know for sure. It is important for the viewer to note that that the shoemaker is never seen again by Lateef, and that the end of the film is also about a shoe that is returned to the owner and footprint of the shoe is shown being erased by rain.

In Iranian cinema, one hardly encounters physical touch by the opposite sexes, and true to this spirit the only acknowledgement of love is a smile or a furtive glance acknowledging the lover. With such constraints, memories become valuable than touch and more so in a movie like Baran, which transcends a love tale to enter a higher level of philosophy knocking at the doors of Sufism (and perhaps Tabula Rasa?).

The movie Baran is replete with minor details that indicate ethnic differences within the Iranian population that becomes apparent in the film but not to a casual visitor to Iran (I have visited Iran more than once on official work but never noticed the mosaic of ethnicity beyond the sprinkling of Armenians in Teheran and the bulk of the Persian Iranian population). Baran could be essentially classified as a tale of the Afghan refugee and the Afghan's eventual desire to return to his homeland, but Majidi’s Baran introduces colourful vignettes of Azeri Iranian (as associated with Azerbaijan), the Turkmen Iranian (as associated Turkmenistan), the Kurds and the Lurs. The official website of Baran explains the details. The construction site brings the different ethnicities together. Majidi’s screenplay knits the logical interplay between the communities: the Persian Iranians play the Inspectors, the Azeris bond together and take care of each other, the Kurds and the Lurs are easily provoked to fight the Azeris, while the poor Afghans, without identity papers, toil away for a fraction of what the others earn always fearing deportation if spotted by the Persian Iranian inspectors. And in Majidi's script and film, each ethnic group lives in separate rooms while they work together at the same construction site. Forget the love story, because these details, lovingly crafted, tell another realistic story that is perhaps more interesting than the obvious love tale.

There is a strange similarity that I note between Majidi’s Baran and Aki Kaurismaki’s Man Without a Past. In both movies, the past of the main persona is forgotten and a new person emerges harking back to Tabula Rasa--to start life anew. In both films “rain” is a mystical symbol—in Baran, you see the footprint of the beloved (or philosophically the one you seek) in the rain towards end of the film; in Man Without a Past there is rain on a clear day to grow potatoes, rain that grows six or seven potatoes on a small patch of land, and the last half-potato is given away to a stranger who wants to eat it to avoid scurvy! Futrther, in Baran there is a departure by a hired vehicle for Afghanistan, in Kaurismaki’s film there is a train that is moving forward, a visual metaphor used to punctuate past and future. Both Majidi and Kaurismaki seem to have similar minds and affinity in their personal philosophies.

A closing thought. Did Majidi, when he wrote the script, intend to make a love story relating to one dazzling individual that struck a chord in a boy’s heart and mind or did Majidi want to make a philosophical film on the life of a young man maturing into one that cares for others less fortunate than himself? I feel both stories co-exist in this film and it is the viewer who has to choose which tale is the more powerful strand of the two.

P.S. Aki Kaurismaki's film Man Without a Past has been reviewed earlier on this blog

107. Canadian director Neil Diamond’s documentary film “Reel Injun” (2009): A documentary that helps a viewer re-evaluate what cinema makes the viewer believe to be true

2010-11-29T08:11:00.000-08:00

Who is the real Native Indian of North America or, if you prefer, the American Indian? The images that many will recall of the Native Indian of USA and Canada are often closely related to the images of the native Indian conjured up by Hollywood, often images that have been stretched far from an accurate depiction for the sake of convenience by Hollywood directors, scriptwriters, and costume designers. And we the viewers after watching several such depictions begin to believe in these inaccuracies. For instance, one associates Native Indians to wear headbands while in reality the headband was common headgear only for a small fraction of the Indian nations on that continent. The headband was used by Hollywood initially for stunt actors to keep their wigs in place as they performed amazing acts for the camera. Gradually the headband became the norm of the Native Indian’s regalia. This is one of the many interesting insights provided by Neil Diamond’s Reel Injun.

Neil Diamond, the director of the full-length documentary is not the singer Neil Diamond that my generation would fondly recall. He is a Native Indian from Canada, of the Cree nation, and a filmmaker. The film is an interesting mix of interviews and film clips of Westerns made over a century with Native Indians. Reel Injun looks critically at how cinema can blur the truth about the Native Indian. The interviewees include Native Indians and Hollywood icons such as Clint Eastwood and independent director Jim Jarmusch, who are obviously not Native Indians. The film discusses the controversial incident at Wounded Knee in 1973, which has a direct bearing on the several Hollywood films recalling the century-old but more important incident at Wounded Knee in 1890 and of the more famous Little Big Horn incident in 1876. Both incidents are history; the moot question is how the incidents were recorded in history and on film. Poet Stephen Vincent Benet immortalized the former incident in his poem “Bury my heart at Wounded Knee,” and popular songs and films such as Hidalgo (2004) and Into the West (2005) followed in Benet’s footsteps.

I am not a US citizen but I grew up watching Hollywood cinema that recorded the 1876 incident. One particular film etched in my memory as a kid was Lewis R Forster’s Tonka (1958) produced by Walt Disney and thanks to that film even as a kid the viewpoint of the Native Indian struck a chord with me. It is unfortunate that no clip from Tonka was included in Reel Injun because it was one of the few Hollywood movies that came very close to portraying a positive view of the Native Indian. Forster’s film is an important one for Native Indians as it provided the “unromantic truth of the warfare on the plains” (General Custer’s last stand) as one writer wryly noted. Tonka was not the only Hollywood film that portrayed native Indians positively: there was John Ford’s important film Cheyenne Autumn (1964), Arthur Penn’s Little Big Man (1970) , Michael Mann’s The Last of the Mohicans (1992), Terence Mallick’s The New World (2005) and finally my favourite Abraham Polonsky’s Tell Them Willie Boy is Here (1969). Each of these top-notch films are important takes on the Native Indian but Mr Diamond only chose to discuss the Arthur Penn film and the Michael Mann film to drive home his point of view.

A major point of discussion in the film is Marlon Brando’s support for the Native American and Brando’s decision to decline the Godfather Best Actor Oscar in 1973 by sending a Native Indian to read out his message protesting the depiction of the Native Indian by Hollywood. John Wayne was so incensed that he wanted to physically attack the Native Indian who came on stage to refuse the award. Other critics claimed the lady was not a Native American at all but was of Italian descent and so on. But the brave lady Sacheen Littlefeather (born Marie Cruz) made a point that made the world sit up. For me, Brando was not just a great actor, but a man who was sensitive to social issues around him. This action of Brando is in line with his comment that his lead role in Gillo Pontecorvo’s Quiemada was the finest piece of acting he ever did. Quiemada has only seen a fraction of critical acclaim in comparison with Brando’s work in mainstream Hollywood films.

After you have viewed Neil Diamond’s documentary you will have a definite position on the subject. You might agree with Diamond or you might not. Arguably Reel Injun is not the finest of documentaries but it is definitely a documentary that will set the viewer thinking. Diamond underscores the fact that often the viewer assumes that what he or she sees on screen is correct while cinema is a potent hidden persuader. Diamond fleshes out the real personalities of Native Indian actors such as Russell Means and Wes Studi, who played major roles as Native Indians in Mann’s The Last of the Mohicans. Diamond’s film, most of all, will effectively persuade a true filmgoer to seek out the revisionist films from North America that put the Native Indian in a better perspective than the traditional Western with the stereotype roles of scalp-hunting savages. Diamond’s film discusses roles and personalities of Native Indian actors Graham Greene (I often wonder if the celebrated late novelist Graham Greene knew of this Canadian actor, best known for his Oscar-winning role in another revisionist film Dances with Wolves and who shared his name) and American Native Indian actor Will Sampson who played the unforgettable role of Chief Bromden who pretends to be deaf and dumb in Milos Foreman’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Finally, Diamond’s film includes Clint Eastwood’s statement made in an interview to Mr Diamond that relates to the Oscar Academy debating whether Native Indians portraying themselves can be considered to be essaying a performance worthy of an Academy Award! However, the following personal quote of the late actor Will Sampson best encapsulates the point of view of Reel Injun: “Hollywood writers and directors are still using 'em for livestock. They somehow just can't seem to bring it around to give the truth about Indians.”

P.S. Arthur Penn's Little Big Man and Gillo Pontecorvo's Quiemada (Burn!) have been discussed earlier on this blog.

106. Iranian director Mohsen Makhmalbaf’s “Safar e Gandehar” (Kandahar) (2001): An ode to a tragedy called Afghanistan

2010-10-27T07:34:00.000-07:00

Time magazine selected Makhmalbaf’s Kandahar as one of the top 100 films of all time. If one judges quality of cinema solely by the story or the plot, Time magazine is not off the mark. It won minor awards at the Cannes and Thessaloniki film festivals as well.

Afghanistan, like Darfur (Sudan), would make any sensitive human being wince on viewing on screen the tragedy of a great nation buffeted by forces that do not get weaker but stronger each year. Generations of Afghans have faced hunger, fear and a life deprived of democracy, equality and education and, last but not least, economic and social progress. Take the Afghan factor out of the movie (something quite unthinkable!) and the film would be no better than a clever documentary. This remark does not indicate that I do not admire Mohsen Makhmalbaf as a creative filmmaker; I sincerely do.

Mr Makhmalbaf loves Afghanistan. He makes any viewer of Kandahar empathize with the problems of that country. Women of Afghanistan have less freedom than women elsewhere. They are forced to cover their bodies in a gown called the burqa and have to apply lipstick within the confines of the gown—one of the many tragi-comic details the director provides the viewer. Grown-up women have to be led by young male kids, because a male kid has more social power than a female. Children grow up in constant fear of land mines that can take away a limb and have to enrol in schools (madrasas) where education is centred on learning the Koran by rote and the importance of Kalashnikovs. Any journey to the countryside is fraught with many dangers: robbers, well-water contaminated by worms that could make one sick if consumed without boiling, check-posts governed by the Taliban that deprive you of any books that they suspect to be socially subversive. The film is definitely a great attempt by Mr Makhmalbaf to introduce the travails of the ordinary Afghan to the wider world.

An amazing visual sequence in the film presents a group of men running on crutches to grab artificial limbs dropped by low-flying aircraft near a Red Cross Centre that tries to help the growing numbers of victims of the myriad landmines. While the problem is a real one, the sequence would make any intelligent viewer wonder at the fine line dividing reality and illusion. Look closely and you will find the Afghans are caught on camera smiling when they are supposed to be running desperately to procure a prosthetic leg! There is another sequence where the director underscores the need for constant medical care for the average Afghan and that lack of proper medical care. To the credit of the director, the problem of treating a sick woman with a curtain separating the patient and doctor drives home the tragedy, however comic and unreal the scenario appears to the viewer. Somewhere in the periphery of the plot is a woman about to commit suicide. The Afghan tragedy, in spite of the unwitting comedy in the movie, is endless. Mr Makhmalbaf is not the only individual in his family concerned with the Afghan problem; his young daughter Hana made a beautiful film Buddha collapsed out of shame also on the Afghan tragedy where the historical Bamyan statues of Buddha were destroyed by the Taliban and how young girls in Afghanistan are deprived of education that young boys can access. Hana’s elder sister has made another evocative tale called Blackboards, another true scenario near the Iran/Iraq Kurdish border, where teachers literally carry blackboards to impart education to children and earn a living. The Makhmalbaf family is truly an amazing family of filmmakers from Iran.

If you want to see the creative genius of the Iranian director Mohsen Makhmalbaf and head of this family, one needs to view his earlier but lesser known work Gabbeh, which I consider to be very close to magical cinema of the Armenian maestro Sergei Paradjanov. Gabbeh did not have rely on the subject to prove Makhmalbaf’s abilities, it transported you to the breathtaking world of cinema by the inherent merit of its visuals and sound. Here was a tale of love and lovers with the magic of Iranian carpets for a backdrop. (Incidentally, Mohsen Makhmalbaf won the Paradjanov award for cinema, a few years ago for his contribution to cinema).

Mohsen Makhmalbaf made yet another amazing film in Tajikistan called Sex and Philosophy years after he made Kandahar, where he once again showed his real talent that we glimpsed in Gabbeh. That film, unlike the suggestive title, has neither sex nor nudity—the subject of sex is merely suggested by a male hand and a female hand caressing each other, in lyrical synchrony to the violin of Vanessa Mae. The director states on his website that the four women shown are his vision of the development of the adult women. The story is constructed on a series of intellectual debates of a cynical male philosopher and his women friends, eventually retracting from the world of a lover to one of self imposed loneliness (shades of the Iranian Mehrjui's The Pear Tree and Allan Sillitoe's short story The loneliness of the long-distance runner hover, as the subject balances social concerns and politics without making either one obvious) while paying tribute to Russian literary geniuses Chekov and Tolstoy (whose names are thrown by the shopkeeper who sell three antique watches). Do not miss out the hidden, mischievous comment that the third watch on sale, indirectly connected to Stalin, is picked up by the protagonist's third lover who likes to erase the protagonist from her memory, preferring the watch to the ones related to literary figures! The film tries to imitate the colour coding of the late Polish genius Kieslowski. In this Makhmalbaf film, the four women wear black, red, blue and white and the colour coding is accomplished quite well. Evidently the second lover had shades of the last of the four characters as she wears one red shoe and one white one. The switch from one colour to the other is gradual.

The film is very well made with touches of the absurd (talking to each other within the same car using mobile phones, "a cold coffee with a cold smile", a poodle in a woman's bed preferred to the human lover) and the surreal (a big passenger plane with just one passenger, autumn leaves covering a dance hall, the lighted candles on the dashboard of a moving car, etc).

To revert to Makhmalbaf’s Kandahar, I applaud the director’s intentions. The colour of the bridal party of burqa clad women looks lovely. With the same breath, I wonder if those colourful burqas can be associated with Taliban ruled Afghanistan where black and grey are often the colour of burqas that one would tend to associate lifestyles of Afghan women in the remote parts of the country. But then this is Mr Makhmalbaf of the colourful Gabbeh and Sex and Philosophy as well. In any case, whether you loved Kandahar or not, it would make you reflect on what it showed. As an Indian national, I loved the Sanskrit shlokas being recited on the soundtrack from time to time. Was Mohsen Makhmalbaf trying to be ecumenical? Or was it his family's love for Indian culture that made this addition?

But if you want to see the director at his best—I recommend Gabbeh or his later film Sex and Philosophy. The moot question is what do you want in good cinema: do you want the subject or do you want an intelligent presentation of the subject to overpower your senses? Mr Makhmalbaf can present both types of cinema in separate films that he has made.

P.S. Hana Makhmalbaf's Buddha Collapsed from Shame was reviewed earlier on this blog.

105. French director Pierre Granier-Deferre’s “Le Chat” (The Cat) (1971): True love which the wrecking balls of change cannot demolish

2010-10-05T02:32:00.000-07:00

The Cat will remain one of my all time favourite French films. It is realistic. It is endearing. It is more complex than a mere love story. It provides food for thought to masticate before it is fully digested. It is capable of evoking profound emotions in an observant viewer. More importantly, the film is not about a cat, or unusual human beings, but more about two endearing ordinary human beings with follies not markedly different from any one of us.

At the very basic level, The Cat is an obvious masterpiece of cinema showcasing the non-verbal, well-developed acting skills of two amazing French thespians: Jean Gabin and Simone Signoret. And capturing all their complex and subtle emotions on film is director Pierre Granier-Deferre, who never surpassed his amazing skills evident in this particular cinematic work in any of his other films. In The Cat, Granier-Deferre created a sophisticated little French film that combined the directorial maturity of Marcel Carne’s The Children of Paradise (1945) which was a delectable study of individuals and Jean-Pierre Melville’s debut film The Silence of the Sea (1949), where non-comic, non-verbal communication was showcased as never ever before. However, both Carne and Melville did not have the advantage of utilizing two great actors at the zenith of their careers, as did Granier-Deferre. Granier-Deferre built his film on the cinematic building blocks that Carne and Melville had already provided French cinema. Granier-Deferre’s The Cat deservedly won both the best actor and the best actress awards at the Berlin Film Festival in 1971 but missed accolades in other departments.

Many critics have praised the contribution of Gabin and Signoret in The Cat. To this day, I am not aware of any critic appreciating the contribution of Graniere-Deferre in The Cat over that of the acknowledged performances of the two leads in the film. Graniere-Deferre’s rightful contribution to this remarkable cinematic product seems to have been overshadowed by the performances.

Essentially, The Cat is an intelligent adaptation on film of a Georges Simenon novel published in 1967. The story was adapted into a screenplay by Graniere-Deferre and Pascal Jardi within a few years of the novel getting published. The Simenon tale is a love story with a difference. It can easily be mistaken for a film about a husband (Julien Bouin, played by Gabin) and his wife (Clemence, played by Signoret) who hate each other in the twilight of their lives. Contrary to any such impression, the film is essentially an immaculate tale of love between a trapeze artist and a typesetter, how they remain married and faithful, and how their love survives, imperceptible at times but strong as concrete to their last breath. This is a quaint tale from a country where changing spouses is very common. Simenon’s story adds steel to the concrete, when you realize that the couple are childless and that the wife has had an accident on the trapeze that leaves her with a limp and little prospect of another job. She is not without male admirers but she prefers her spouse to them.

In another French scenario one could assume that Julien is a devout Catholic who cannot divorce his wife. But that is not the case, as there is no mention whatsoever in the film of religion. In fact there is another woman in Julien’s life, younger and more attractive woman than his wife Clemence. But when he is with the “other woman” it is not for sex but to discuss his wife. What the wife does not realize is that her husband leaves her company when her actions are intolerable to him, and not because he has stopped loving her as a devoted husband.

Now how did Graniere-Deferre and Pascal Jardi sculpt the Simenon story into a great movie screenplay? Early in the film, a nurse in a hospital says “How do you spell Bouin?” Someone answers off screen “As it sounds, B-O-U-I-N.” The opening lines in a film with few spoken lines let you know the characters you will meet are ordinary. They are not characters that leave a mark in society if and when they do leave us.

Then the director Graniere-Deferre picks an unimpressive old building at end of a cul-de-sac standing obstinately as the entire neighbourhood is being demolished by developers to make way for bigger, taller buildings. Julien and Clemence Bouin are the denizens of this decrepit old house that was their dream house to retire in the evening of their lives. The house is small, cozy and manageable. Yet the director gives ample evidence by splicing sequences of demolitions and construction that this sweet house may not survive since its immediate neighbourhood has not survived the winds of change.

The development of the characters is not facilitated by dialogue as much as by their actions. Their movements indicate that each of them is intensely watchful of the other as they go on their individual grocery shopping trips, without interfering in each other’s activities. The camera of Oscar-winning cinematographer Walter Wottitz (The Longest Day) captures a poignant sequence from a high angle as the two leads in the film proceed to make their separate suppers and eat on separate little tables in their tiny kitchen without a word spoken. The dream team of art directors of the film should be also credited for building up atmosphere of the house within and without and they included Vincent Korda (brother to Alexander and Zoltan Korda and art director of both The Longest Day and Carol Reed’s The Third Man), Ted Haworth (The Longest Day, Hitchcock’s Strangers on a Train, and Siegel’s original Invasion of the Body Snatchers) and Léon Barsacq (The Longest Day, Carne’s The Children of Paradise). I would assume, and I have no proof whatsoever of this, that Graniere-Deferre somehow got the services of many of these behind scenes geniuses who were working on the The Longest Day to work on his film The Cat as well. The combined magic of all these men contributed to this little, big French film. The magic combine was able to draw a remarkable parallel of the world of Bouins and the demolition being undertaken outside their nest. In Jean-Paul Sartre’s own phrase this was “the externalization of the internalization” of the characters, grappling with age, and rapid changes around them.

The title character of The Cat is introduced quite late into the film when Julien communicates with Clemence by scribbling notes on small bits of paper and propelling them with an index finger as a carrom player would to make the pieces of paper land squarely on his wife’s lap. The first note the viewer reads carry two words The Cat. The animal actually was a denizen of this house until the wife in a fit of jealousy killed it in the hope that her husband would then give her more attention than the cat leading to the reign of silence in the house. But an attentive viewer will note that these were not the words that Julien wrote initially. He wrote another note when he heard Clarence coughing, probably a note of concern, that he threw away. The director, of course, uses this juncture to commence a flashback on the subplot relating to the cat.

Graniere-Deferre’s commendable achievement lies in his ability to contrast the resolute love and affection between the husband and wife underneath the cold war on the surface of the main plot which takes place in the foreground of constant demolition of structures, jobs and values that Julien and Clemence were used to in early parts of their lives. Julien even has an acidic comment on the users of the low-cost hotel run by his female friend that caters to lovers who do not seem to have the unshakable marital commitment of Julien and Clemence that even their friends note even during tremors that seem shake their commitment. Graniere-Deferre’s second achievement is gathering the talent of three noteworthy art directors (including two from Hollywood) realizing quite well in advance of the filming the importance of art direction to make this film tick. His third achievement is the structure of the script that hangs between two hospital scenes that almost open and end the film. These are two scenes that seem disconnected with the main story but are actually the most resounding comment provided by the filmmakers.

I have loved this film because it is not just a film with great performances but one that underscores the importance of the director, the screenplay writers, the original novelist, the cinematographer, and the art directors. It is truly a film that you will relish if you care to go beyond the obviously interesting story of Georges Simenon. This is a film that needs to be widely seen and appreciated.

104. The late Argentine director Fabián Bielinsky’s “El Aura” (The Aura) (2005): A mind–bending thriller that takes you beyond guns, women and lucre

2010-08-23T21:44:00.000-07:00

Argentine director Fabián Bielinsky (1959-2006) died months after making The Aura following a heart attack at the age of 47. The Aura was his second feature film. His first feature film was Nine Queens. Incredibly, the two feature films together have picked up at least 30 awards worldwide.

If Bielinsky were alive and making movies, he could well have been the toast of cineastes today. But most of all, Bielinsky’s two movie career is unusual because both films were based his own original screenplays, not a mere adaptation of a novel, story, or play and not even based on actual events. I stumbled on these two interesting films at a minor film festival amongst some 50 odd international films on show, organized in Trivandrum, India, the organizers of which did not realize what they had inadvertently accomplished! They were showing a Bielinsky retrospective without trumpeting that fact.

While Nine Queens, the first feature film of Bielinsky, recalls the humour and thrills of the original The Italian Job (1969) with Michael Caine and Noel Coward that took a swipe at the emerging civic problem of traffic jams, Bielinsky’s script captured the cancer of Argentine societal malaise of scams with a twinkle in his eye. Here was a thriller that entertained not just Argentinean audiences but festival audiences worldwide, while it dissected the cadaver of the social maggots of Argentina on the sly. (The title, Nine Queens, refers to a set of rare stamps around which the film’s main plot revolves.)

The second Bielinsky film The Aura takes a quantum jump in sophistication of plot development, social criticism, riveting performances, and entertainment that makes films such as Memento look flashy and somewhat juvenile. Both the Bielinsky films have the incredibly talented Argentine actor Ricardo Darin, portraying characters that are distinctly different in moods and actions.

The Aura encourages the viewer to turn detective. Bielinsky begins and ends The Aura a psychological noir thriller, a caper, and a epileptic’s take on marriages (his own and another’s) sandwiched between two scenes of a talented taxidermist at work in his studio. Yes, the film is about an epileptic. An epileptic taxidermist, to be precise. What Bielinsky insinuates is that a taxidermist deals with the dead and makes the stuffed animals come alive for us who love to recall the fauna that habits or habited this planet. A taxidermist naturally has to observe the details of the animal or bird and, if possible, imagine their movements and looks, to make his products life-like for us to enjoy in a museum or home. And what if the taxidermist who is trained to work on noting details of life has the gift of a photographic memory to boot? Would such a talented individual be making a living, stuffing dead animal carcasses?

Bielinsky’s The Aura takes you on roller-coaster ride of an animal hunting expedition in the Patagonian forests, dead bodies, man and animal bonding, abuse of wives/women, wives leaving their husbands, thugs who kill for money, talented kids who can draw detailed pictures, and finally planning the perfect crime. Bielinsky’s script has a moralistic vein as well. Early in the film, there is mention of the epileptic taxidermist’s wife leaving him. Yet there is no rancour for the man towards the female species, he actually helps a woman flee a no-win situation of exploitation and fear. For Bielinsky’s complex script the bonding between dog and man is more stable and enduring than that of a man and a woman.

That epilepsy is central to the development of the plot is not without meaning. Bielinsky is not the first creative artist to find the subject useful to weave a great tale: Fyodor Dostoevesky (The Idiot) and Thomas Mann (Buddenbrooks) probably lit the path for Bielinsky to tread in this film. An epileptic fit becomes a useful point for the plot to use as reference to the past and future. Belinsky uses the event once early in the film and another much later in the film. And interestingly both events have diametrically opposing roles with time in relation to the plot development. The first event in front of a cash teller machine cannot be easily defined by time in relation to the plot, at least by the time the movie ends. The second event is more finite and seems to fit into the plot. But which is real and which is not? Is an epileptic fit a convenient moment of epiphany for creative novelists and scriptwriters?

Bielinsky does not limit the film to entertainment associated with a heist. Michael Mann’s Heat was a rare Hollywood movie that combined an action movie with complex character developments, marital relationships, and alter egos. Bielinsky’s film goes a step further than Michael Mann’s commendable effort. Bielinsky makes the viewer to rewind the images he has relished earlier in the film to figure out what was real and what was unreal. In fact, the delectable movie provides two distinct story lines parallel to each other. It is left to the viewer to figure out which was real. And you will realize that the director carefully leaves behind clues that could bolster either theory. That’s amazing cinema of a novel variety.

Bielinsky’s cinema seems to mirror the social fabric of Argentina, deliberately or unconsciously. While Nine Queens had looked at scams big and small, The Aura looks at taxidermy where the dead is made to look alive. Social analogies are inferred, though not stated. Crime and easy money seem to be omnipresent in his scripts, though critical of their power over the average citizen. The importance of the life-like eye in the stuffed animal goes beyond verisimilitude in this film. It is a metaphor that becomes evident as the film progresses.

To talk of the plot of The Aura will not do justice to this remarkable film. The bulwark of the film was the almost dead-pan yet sophisticated top notch performance by actor Ricardo Darin. His performance in this film, much superior to a very good one in Nine Queens, combines elements of a sick man, a very quick witted man, a very observant man, and a man who appreciates love and cannot bring himself to pull the trigger to kill even an animal. You think at times that Darin is portraying a dour, colourless character. Yet the ability of the thespian in combining several other aspects of the character without having to shout or cry, which an Al Pacino, Richard Burton or Marlon Brando would resort to, is nothing short of amazing. It is as much an actor’s film as it is a director’s film.

Similarly, several other facets of the film are extremely praiseworthy. One such facet is the music of Lucio Godoy that provides an excellent foil to build the mood as the plot develops. The director ensures that the lovely music does not occupy the centre stage at any point. The cinematography (Checco Varese) and the art direction (Mercedes Alfonsin) are elements that are so crucial in making the film so meaningful and complete. Each detail shown in the film provides clues for the viewer to decide which of the two equally radical options the film offers is to be chosen as the real tale.

At a stage when Argentine cinema is making waves having won the 2010 Best Foreign Film Oscar for another Argentine film with Ricardo Darin titled The Secret in Their Eyes, the absence of Bielinsky is unfortunate. Had Bielinsky been alive today, world cinema would have been richer for it, especially as he seemed to be a director, like Krzysztof Kieslowski, rapidly honing his skills with each film.

103. Australian director Peter Weir’s Australian film “The Last Wave” (Black Rain) (1977): Australian cinema at its best, connecting dreams and reality

2010-08-08T02:34:00.000-07:00

Today, many filmgoers associate Peter Weir with his touching US movie Dead Poets’s Society. I, too, love Dead Poet’s Society for the message it conveys to its audiences and for the charming performances of its actors. But if the evaluation is based on the quality of the cinema, I would rate Weir’s earlier film The Last Wave, a film he made in his native Australia, to be intrinsically far superior.

There are several reasons why I consider Weir’s The Last Wave to stand out amongst Weir’s interesting and rich cinematic works.

First, unlike his more talked about films Dead Poet’s Society, Gallipoli, Picnic at Hanging Rock, Witness, The Year of Living Dangerously, The Truman Show, Fearless, and Cars that Ate Paris, all of which are either based on actual events and characters, or works of novelists, Weir’s The Last Wave is an intensely original personal story, conceptualized and developed by the director himself. It is inconsequential that the end of the film is left open-ended and is difficult to comprehend for many who prefer finite endings for movies. But then which parts of our life are fully finite and understood? In a fascinating interview available on the internet with the director, Ms Judith Kass reveals that Weir’s idea to make the film was initiated by an indefinable sudden urge to dig up a buried ancient statue of a child in Tunisia, after stumbling on another piece of the statue above ground, while on a holiday in that country. This incident led Weir to develop the story of this thought-provoking movie. For those who believe in spiritual coincidences, could there be a better reality tale?

Second, this is a rare attempt in the annals of Australian cinema to truly understand the Aboriginal inhabitant’s mind, values, and sacred beliefs with part sanction and approval from the Aboriginals themselves.

Third, some of the actors in the film were not “acting” in the true sense—they were portraying characters they had decided for themselves after they were satisfied with Weir’s script. In fact, a real life Aboriginal and tribal magistrate Nandjiwarra Amagula ‘plays’ the role of “Charlie” in the film, after incorporating his and other Aboriginals’ views on the development of that character. For Nandjiwarra Amagula, this was his sole movie appearance.

Most of all I love my favorite line in the film “Our dreams are shadows of something real.” And this is not Sigmund Freud, but the words of the original scriptwriters of the film—Peter Weir, Tony Morphett and Petru Popescu.

The film is essentially just that. It sways between dreams and reality. It toys with subconscious memories, rebirths, ancestral faiths, and relationships with natural calamities.

For Weir, the plot of the film balances the virtues of material wealth of modern Western society with the spiritual wealth of Aboriginals of Australia. It is also a tale of nature doing unusual things, when rain is not clean water but a dark liquid, when wind and rain can make you squirm with fear within the safety of your home and when you feel they are speaking to you, when waves from the sea can appear to be like a tsunami, literally or figuratively speaking. The Aboriginals seem to to know more about the strange natural phenomena than the richer and more educated European Australians. It is also a tale of how modern Australia has built cities such as Sydney over traditional Aboriginal land with artifacts and totems that may still be holy and sacred to the tribes that once ruled the land. And these artifacts could be truly buried under the sewers and waste outlets of modern cities.

The Last Wave is an inquiry into one’s subconscious as well. It is definitely not a thriller or even a horror film. The lead character David Burton (a decent performance by American actor Richard Chamberlain) of the movie is an Australian lawyer, who is supposed to have a South American lineage. He is defending an Aboriginal accused in a murder of another. He experiences strange dreams and feels he has an unidentifiable "connection" to one of the accused in the case. The Aboriginals in turn identify him to be a “mukurul from across the sea.” Weir develops the connection further as the plot progresses, as the character David shows a distinct affinity and curiosity for the Aboriginals. The same Aboriginals frighten David’s wife, while they mean no harm. As David encounters Charlie the Aboriginal to ask him why he had come outside his home and frightened his wife on a rainy night, and asks him “Who are you?” Charlie’s enigmatic response is “Who are you? Who are you? Who are you? Are you a fish? Are you a snake? Are you a man? Who are you?” An existential conundrum indeed, probably partly resolved when David picks up an aboriginal “mask” figuratively and literally, much later towards the end of the movie.

Weir achieves a rare feat in cinema as the film empathizes with the unknown instead of tending to rationalize the odd facts presented in the script. When I saw the film, some 30 years ago, it provided a great introduction to the emerging and throughly awesome Australian cinema of the Seventies. When I view the same film today I get the feeling of reassurance that Weir had somehow grasped the uncanny problem of vagaries of nature relating to water that Australians increasingly face as they wait for cloud bearing storms to survive the ever increasing water shortage on the continent. That he was not able connect this to the main tale adequately is unfortunate. Can Australia afford to forget the spiritual wealth of the original inhabitants of that continent as they grapple with nature’s vagaries even to this day?

Critics have pointed out that Weir was at a loss to close the tale and the apocalyptic end was not in the original script. If you reflect on the final scene of the film one could say that Weir truly couldn’t have ended the tale any better. It is a film that will make the viewer question many facts, dreams, and the freaky behaviors of nature. It need not be Australia-centric but has relevance to parallel global values.

Kudos for this nugget of cinema need to go not just to Weir, but to a host of other gifted Australians: cinematographer Russell Boyd, actor David Gulpilil, composer Charles Wain, and Oscar winning cameraman John Seale (obviously an apprentice in this film).

My appreciation of the film increased after reading Peter Weir’s interview with Judith M. Kass available at http://www.peterweircave.com/articles/articlei.html But the best lines in the interview are the following.

Judith Kass: What would you like your audiences to know about your films?

Peter Weir: I remember a quote of Bruce Springsteen's in Rolling Stone. He said, "I like to give my audiences something money can't buy." So I'd like them to walk out with much more than the $4.00 or whatever it cost.

If you have seen the movie, reflect on the importance of the original title of the film The Last Wave and perhaps you will get more value than $4! The Last Wave won the Golden Ibex (the Grand Prize) at the Teheran International Film Festival, 1977.

102. US director Elia Kazan’s “The Visitors” (1972) (USA): Remarkable and disturbing cinema that forces the viewer to introspect

2010-07-22T09:23:00.000-07:00

The Visitors is a remarkable film on a dark subject that becomes even more significant if you are aware of the dark side of the talented director. And more interestingly most American film critics have either ignored this work or trashed it.

The Visitors begins with hardly a sound on the soundtrack. The camera captures, in a long shot, a snowbound house. It is apparently early morning. Tree branches are covered in snow and icicles. A dog roams outdoors. It is evident the director, Elia Kazan, wishes to begin the ‘cinematic narration’ of the tale with a visual metaphorical distance. Lights come on in the darkened house as the inmates wake up. You see a male and a female figure come down from the bedroom upstairs to the living room as they peer outside from the window at the bleak snow covered exterior. There is some subtle body language that suggests that they tolerate each other, that they are comfortable with each other and yet somehow that they are not madly in love. Kazan deliberately does not add music to the soundtrack to please the viewer. The director suggests a cold and sombre tale is to unfold. And the film does prove to be a sombre, thought-provoking tale.

The Visitors ends with the same duo alone in the house. Only now both the camera and the two individuals shown at start of the film are inside the house. The indoors are dark and shadows seem to win over the light, unlike the beginning where light won over shadows. There is a new distance between the couple. There is no physical touching between the couple as in the opening sequence. The body language accentuates a distance between the duo. At the same time you note a discrete new bonding between the two that was obviously missing in the opening sequence as they look at each other. And again there is no sound on the soundtrack. Elia Kazan, the master director, in a way has captured a scream or a wail without the noise—and the silent scream or wail comes from within the director’s heart. This is Elia Kazan of East of Eden (1955) or On the Waterfront (1954) all over again. Yet strangely most Americans wish away The Visitors for some reason. Many would not realize that the The Visitors made the competition grade at Cannes, the year it was made. [It lost out on the major awards at Cannes ‘72 to three equally remarkable films, Francesco Rosi’s The Mattei Case (Italy) , Elio Petri’s The working class goes to heaven (Italy), and Andrei Tarkovsky’s Solyaris (Solaris) (USSR).]

In between the two sequences that I have described, Elia Kazan brings on screen an original script by his son Chris Kazan that obliquely mirrors the dark side of his father’s actions and its consequences in real life for his father. The Visitors is a tale of war crimes and the ripple effect of the revelations of such crimes. In Vietnam, two American army men rape and kill a young defenceless Vietnamese woman. A third American watches, does not participate even when asked to, and eventually testifies against his comrades in war. The perpetrators of the crime are punished. The man who was watching is tormented that he did not stop the rape and killing. He eventually becomes a pacifist after he is court-martialled following his testimony.

Chris Kazan’s story is about the aftermath of the incident. Will the soldiers who were punished forgive the man who testified against them? Will the 'father-in-law' of a pacifist ever come to terms with his 'son-in-law', when he himself is a war veteran of a different war, loves the traditions of the army and is still trigger happy, killing dogs instead of enemy soldiers?

The story on screen written by Chris Kazan has an uncanny parallel with his father Elia Kazan’s (the director of the film) life. Elia Kazan, a brilliant director, a former Communist in the US, chose to testify at the now-Infamous Joseph McCarthy hearings on Un-American Activities at the height of his career. He and some others like actor Robert Taylor named “names” following which several bright minds of Hollywood were blacklisted for life because they were suspected of being “Communists.” Some examples of the victims of this witch-hunt, direct and indirect, were talented directors Charles Chaplin and Abraham Polonsky. Many believe that the famous screen line that actor Marlon Brando shouts in On the Waterfront “I am glad what I done, you hear me? Glad what I done” reflected the thoughts of Kazan after his testimony. And like the Vietnamese war crime testifier, Elia Kazan had equal numbers of supporters as he had detractors. At the Oscar ceremony, where he was conferred a lifetime achievement award, several notable Hollywood invitees opted to remain seated and not applaud the recipient. Kazan had to bear the brunt of his testimony just as the anti-hero of The Visitors. The silent end of the The Visitors is a more powerful antithesis of the torment that made Brando's character shout the famous last lines of On the waterfront.

The two Kazans, Elia and son Chris, present a trenchant tale that provides a moral dilemma for the viewer. Can a military man squeal on his colleagues? Is morality higher than unwritten codes of military honor? In The Visitors, the anti-hero Bill (a worthy debut performance by actor James Woods) has testified against his comrades-in-arms and does not regret it. What he does regret is that he did not have the courage to stop the war crime. He carries the moral burden alone and does not reveal the details to his spouse Martha even though they have child through their live-in relationship, until she confronts him and asks for the facts. Martha’s father is a World War veteran, who gives more importance to military codes of honor and has scant respect towards the father of his grandchild, when he learns of the Vietnam incident from the visitors to his daughter’s house. The visitors are the perpetrators of the Vietnamese war crime who have served their time and are now visiting the man who sent them behind bars.

The film is interesting beyond the obvious interaction between “the whistle-blower” and the criminals. It looks at the characters on the periphery. Martha, who wears glasses and long skirts before the arrival of the visitors, opts to discard the glasses and wear short skirts, which adds another dimension to the straight development of the story. Martha’s father, viewing a game on television, equates life to two teams, nothing more, as it is in war. The Kazans develop a character who, like Martha, seems to give sanction to the events that follow. He even invites the un-invited visitors to stay on.

I believe The Visitors is a well thought out collaboration between father and son exploring the trauma of a man ostracized, a man not considered a virile man when you are a pacifist, a man who believes in his values that might not concur with the majority. Further the film explores the psychology of various characters in the film and their individual grey values. Does a man who says “I forgive you” really mean it? Can a woman who had earlier appreciated the moral stance of her spouse, allow an evil-doer to dance and hug her shortly after the appreciation of her spouse's moral stand? These are grey areas on which questions only a tormented man can ask. I believe this is a Kazan film from the heart of the filmmaker, more explosive, more personal and introspective than any of his previous films. Just as David Lean’s film Ryan’s Daughter was trashed by critics for myopic reasons, Kazan’s The Visitors has a rare individuality and maturity that you only glimpse in his other films. It deserves to be widely seen and re-evaluated now. The importance of the disturbing film is captured and distilled in the final sequence of the film, silent and yet so evocative!

101. Chilean director-in-exile Raúl (Raoul) Ruiz’ French/Swiss film “Ce jour-là “(That Day) (2003): More sense than meets the eye

2010-06-18T10:54:00.000-07:00

Raúl (Raoul) Ruiz, for me, is the most fascinating Latin American filmmaker alive, who is directing films today. It does not matter that he no longer lives in Latin America. It does not matter that he no longer makes films in the Spanish language. It does not matter that he is living in Europe and is considered a European filmmaker by some. Because of its language and its cast, Ruiz’ film Ce jour-là (That Day) will be considered by some as a typical French film. It will be seen by others as a European film because its subject involves Switzerland. But for those who know Ruiz, the film is all about Chile and Latin America, without any overt comment to that effect.

That Day is a fascinating film—a film that can easily be mistaken for a Buster Keaton comedy film or a simplistic dumb cartoon-like comedy for simpletons. In reality, this is a film that provides a fabulous cocktail for the senses of an erudite viewer, combining elements of the Theatre of the Absurd, politics, crime, innovative ideas in cinematography, theology, and cinema aesthetics. It is a film in which the principal characters are either mad or mentally challenged. But then every other character in the film does not behave normally. Is the mentally challenged then, more normal than others? To truly appreciate Raúl Ruiz’s cinema, one needs to know where he is coming from (literally and figuratively). Director Ruiz is a student of law, theology and theatre and each of his films hark back to those influences. In 1968, he was the films advisor to Salvador Allende’s socialist government in Chile. In 1971, he was forced to go into exile after Pinochet overthrew the Allende government.

Many Latin American cinema aficionados would not recognize the name of Raúl Ruiz. And then many, who may be aware of the name, may not consider him to be a major filmmaker, even though he has been living and making films that make the competition grade of Cannes and other major film festivals, with a frequency that is enviable. The main reason for this is that this Chilean filmmaker no longer lives in Chile, or for that matter in Latin America. He lives and makes films, often in French, while in exile in Europe. And his films do not appear to be “Chilean” or even Latin American. Yet look closely, and each Ruiz film is a lamentation of an exile, an essay on his weaning away from his native land. That Day is no exception.

Today, Ruiz’ contemporaries like Miguel Littin (who I can claim to have hugged me like a lost friend in far away Dubai, some 5 years ago, following a spirited one-to-one conversation on Littin’s early movies in a movie theatre foyer following a screening of his latest film The Last Moon, with Miguel‘s daughter interpreting for us) are considered true heroes of Chilean cinema, but not Ruiz. For me, only Littin’s Alcino and the Condor and The Jackal of Nahueltoro are somewhat comparable to the intellectual robustness of Ruiz’ films that I have been lucky to see so far. Littin, who lives in exile in Mexico, has paled in comparison to Ruiz, who is truly blooming in France, Germany and Switzerland, while in exile.

Raúl Ruiz has made some 50 films and unfortuntely I have only seen two and a half of these. And those few have floored me. They provide images that are not easily erased. The first Ruiz film that I saw was Three Crowns of the Sailor (1983) some 20 years ago, a film that tossed reality and unreal images with a felicity that recalled Orson Welles’ witty and brilliant mockumentary and last official feature length film F for Fake (1973). Only much later I stumbled on the fact that Ruiz was a great admirer of Welles. I suspect the wit in the Ruiz’ film had much to do with Welles’ remarkable last film. And as Ruiz’s father was a sailor the connection to Coleridge’s poem Rime of the Ancient Mariner is not misplaced. The film is a lamentation for Chile that Ruiz cannot forget.

The second one is That Day, to which I will revert in detail presently. The “half film” of Ruiz I mentioned is a fascinating 3-minute segment called Le Don Ruiz made as part of the portmanteau film by 32 of the finest living movie directors from around the world using some of the most enigmatic of actors and this collective film was called To each his own cinema (Chacun son cinéma ou ce petit coup au coeur quand la lumière s'éteint et que le film commence) (2007). In those three brief allotted minutes Ruiz, taking a leaf out of sociologist Marcel Mauss' Essai sur le don, gets the French actor Michel Lonsdale to play a “blind” priest, a true faithful of God, who gifts a radio and a movie projector to aboriginal south American Indians (from Chile?) for their upliftment. The innocents tribals turn the gifts into items of barter and ritual sacrifice, which ultimately reach other Europeans who quickly jump to classify the Indians as “blind atheists” while depriving the Indians of their “access” to sound and images (typically cinema).

To comprehend Raúl Ruiz’ cinema, one has to understand who he is and what makes him tick. First, he is a student of law, theology and theatre. In the two films that I have seen all three streams of study play vital parts in the final product on screen. Then, Ruiz is essentially a Chilean director making films in exile in various European countries, ever since Salvador Allende’s government was overthrown by Pinochet. In both the Ruiz films that I have seen, the images of Chile percolate through the European images. As some critics have pointed out, the very “absence of Chile” underscores the Ruiz commentary on his homeland. Laughter in his cinema is an unreal one, suggesting lies rather than truth. It is often a laugh of a sad individual. Finally, Ruiz is a director who loves to experiment with technology of cinema that would leave a true cineaste stunned with his innovativeness.

Is That Day a simple tale for simpletons? I am sure there are some viewers who believe it to be just that. But let me remind those viewers that the film is made by a director who once said, "If you can make it complicated, why make it simple?"

Ruiz’ has stated in his book Poetics of Cinema: “Often, and at times immodestly, I have made use of metaphors in order to approach intuitively certain ideas; many of which could best be described as images and half-glimpsed visions. I hope that among them it is the angelic smile rather than the sardonic irony or the biting impetuousness that has the upper hand. ‘Metaphor’ is a word that has a bad reputation among theorists. To use it implies that one does not have clear ideas, and in that case, the best thing to do is to remain silent. That may be so and I regret it. Yet, in the present state of the arts: does anyone have clear ideas?”

It is therefore not unusual for a viewer to emerge after a Ruiz film totally unclear of what was presented on screen. Ruiz’ cinema often has a dose of the Theatre of the Absurd (termed as surrealism, a related term, by those unfamiliar with theatre). In That Day, a diabetic psychopathic murderer starts shaving his face in front of a door, using the translucent glass as a mirror. It is absurd, especially when you are capturing the actions with a camera from inside the house. But then one has to go beyond realism. Ruiz’ cinema maybe reminiscent of slapstick cartoons but he offers much more. What is the house representing? What is the world outside and inside representing? The Pinochet violence in Chile? The closest overt statement of linking Chile to Ruiz’ tale (his own original script) is the movement of military trucks in a Switzerland “overrun by the military sometime in the future” at two key points in the film. The Pinochet regime was a military backed regime.

Many impatient viewers would miss the fact that the film is an oblique look at Pinochet’s insane violence in Chile towards supporters of the democratically-elected socialist Allende government that made Ruiz and Littin flee the country. There are macabre images of an entire grown up family killed sometimes by a lunatic and sometimes by an innocent woman who throws a hammer carelessly. I wouldn’t be surprised if the Danish director Lars von Trier was influenced by 2003 Ruiz film That Day when he filmed his unforgetable hammer-killing 3-minute segment within a cinema hall in the 2007 film To each his own cinema, (referred to earlier).

That Day is also about detectives solving murders by doing nothing in a café. The clues come to their feet in the form of gossip. But then one has to read beyond the obvious. Under dictatorships “gossip” plays a role different from gossip in democracies. That Day is also a tale of two abnormal people in love dancing to the tune of the ringtones of the cell phones belonging to a pile of corpses they have just killed. That Day is a film that even discusses multinational companies targeting the natural resources of specific countries (water of Bolivia) and the wealth of Switzerland. It is also about people wanting to covet other's property even if the person targeted is within the family. That Day is an intellectual journey that throws hundreds of political and social messages at the viewer. Whether Ruiz’s messages get to you, depend on individual viewers.

Time is an important element in Ruiz’ cinema. In That Day a character comes up to the camera lens and cleans it. Cineastes will love the act. But wait, Ruiz soon reveals from a reverse angle shot that the person was not cleaning the camera lens but face of an old clock thus underlining the connection between camera and time so essential for Ruiz’ tales on celluloid. The female lead in that day sates early in the film “Tomorrow is the best day of my life according to the runes and I Ching” Time is important for Ruiz as he constantly switches between past, present, and future providing links for the alert viewer. The title of the film That Day, is not without deep references.

Theology is equally important. In Le Don, one saw a blind priest trying to bring “light” of conventional religion to non-religious tribals. In That Day, the principal character talks of fallen angels and equates a man who falls of a bicycle as one such angel.

Ruiz’ preoccupation with cinema as medium is not to be discounted. The visual effects of the diabetic murderer feeling uneasy are remarkably innovative. So is the way food on a fork held in animated suspension in air for an unusual duration between plate and mouth underscoring both humor and fear.

Finally, it is tale of love. The murderer will have to go back to the asylum. But in typical Ruiz' black humor but it is the "crazy" murderer's new lover who inherits the financial control of the asylum. So all is not lost for those who are considered crazy by those who are also crazy in their own way!

The message did not get to the Cannes Jury with two beautiful actresses Aishwarya Rai and Meg Ryan, who I suspect had no idea of the Chilean references or the intellectual depth of the film. The Jury in its wisdom gave the top prize to the less impressive Gus van Sant’s Elephant, probably because of the immediacy of campus violence in the US. I guess many would not appreciate Orson Welles' F for Fake, as well. One man’s meat is another man’s poison.

100. Australian director Andrew Dominik’s US film “The assassination of Jesse James by the coward Robert Ford” (2007): A psychological maze

2010-04-30T05:43:00.000-07:00

I confess that this movie made me fall asleep after the first half hour. When I woke up, certain images from the film persisted in my memory (Roger Deakin’s play with light and shadow of the approaching train), nagging me to view the film once again from the start. To my surprise, on my second attempt, I found it to be one of those rare films which do not provide much evidence of good cinema in the early sequences while it provides such evidence much later on. And this is a rather long (2hr 40min) film. However, the film gradually entices the viewer to keep watching with the filmmaking competence improving as the film keeps un-spooling. By the end of the movie, it is quite likely that a patient viewer will not feel cheated by the director Andrew Dominik but instead admire his work that is a cocktail of delicate performances, suitable music, and admirable cinematography.

Long titles often summarize the plot of a film. The killing of the outlaw Jesse James is miniscule to the long tale of psychological games between various characters in the film. Here is a case of fictional biography (what an oxymoron!) authored by Ron Hansen and written for the screen by the director Dominik. While the assassination itself forms the fulcrum of the film, Dominik divides the film at that juncture. First he presents the buildup to the assassination and the second part is the reaction to and the aftermath of the event. Much shorter than the earlier one, it is the second half that truly makes the film come alive.

One would usually associate the word assassination with leaders, political or religious. Here is a tale of an outlaw who killed human beings as he would kill snakes (shown in the movie). Yet ironically he captured the hearts and minds of an entire nation. Here is a tale of a robber of banks and trains. Dominik and Hansen present a revisionist view of the outlaw Jesse James (Brad Pitt), an outlaw wearing clean clothes and a typical family man. The viewer is made to empathize with the dapper Jesse James, the moody Jesse James, the loving Jesse James who gifts a gun to his would be killer…The clouds in the film have a touch of Terence Mallick’s cinema as much as the absurdist visuals of a man taking a bath in a bathtub in the middle of a field. This is not surprising as Dominik is stated to be a fan of Mallick’s Badlands and Mallick in his turn thanks Dominik in the credits of the latter’s The New World.

The film appears to be tale of a fan and a larger-than-life hero. A hero has to be a loner—he not one of us lesser mortals. It is therefore no wonder that Dominik/Hansen’s outlaw sits alone brooding in a backyard close to snakes that he is about to kill to make a point. It is no wonder Dominik/Hansen’s outlaw is one that his own blood brother Frank (Sam Shepard) gradually distances himself from a normal sibling relationship. The filmmakers take great pains to sketch the toll of the evil deeds of the outlaw on himself while journalists and fans think of him differently. The bounty on his head does not help the disintegration of a normal mind that sees enemies and turn tails among his buddies. The repressed anger and frustration comes out on screen as Jesse shoots at a fish in a frozen lake. It is no small wonder that Brad Pitt won the best actor award at the Venice film festival for the role.

The unusual merit of the film is the hero Jesse James in part recognizing his would-be assassin Robert Ford (Casey Affleck), much in advance of his death. He not only quick with his gun, he is quick on the uptake. The silent pact of a Jesus and a Judas is insinuated between the all-knowing outlaw, who after going to the church with his family uncharacteristically keeps his gun away to dust a painting on the wall, and the eventual killer. One could argue that this "Jesus" of the American wild west needs a "Judas" to keep his notoriety alive. The many confrontations between the hero and the fan add up to a cat and mouse game that is captured delightfully by the camera, a twitch here and a look there, and the game is up. Even the Mallick-like nature shots by the impressive Roger Deakins add an underscore to the visual details of the battles between coward and hero.

One of the defining lines of this psychological film is when Jesse James (Pitt) asks his fan and eventual killer Robert Ford (Affleck): “Do you want to be like me or do you want to be me?” Sometime later the fan replies after introspecting “Heaven knows I would be “ornerier” (sic) if I were in your position.” To reduce the film to interactions between hero/anti-hero and coward would be incorrect as the characters take on different hues in each sequence just as the clouds captured by Deakins and Dominik in the movie are ephemeral, changing colors and shapes with time (note the poster of the movie above).

The script goes into top gear after Jesse is killed. Casey Affleck’s character was so far shown in the movie as a fan of 19 going on 20, looking for a chance get rich with the bounty money. The disintegration of the “coward” is more interesting than the disintegration of the “hero”. The first part had shown an assassin hero-worshiping his victim, with homosexual overtones of even sleeping in his bed before the kill. The second section shows him as a heterosexual and exhibiting signs of a courageous man confronting a balladeer (Nick Cave) to correct him on his facts. The scenes of the re-enacted assassinations are lovely studies in human psychology. Affleck’s Oscar nomination for his performance was well deserved.

Over the years I have been amused to find fine Australian talent migrating to USA to make movies. Andrew Dominik is not the first. One recalls Peter Weir who could never recreate the magic of Picnic at Hanging Rock or The Last Wave after crossing the Pacific. Big budgets and Hollywood’s rules seemed to stifle him with some of his latent talent emerging in Dead Poet’s Society. Bruce Beresford is another Aussie director whose work in Australia (such as Breaker Morant) was a tad better than the Oscar winning Tender Mercies and Driving Miss Daisy. It is equally true of a slew of actors Mel Gibson, Nicole Kidman, Russell Crowe, et al. Or the case of the amazing Australian cinematographers Russell Boyd and John Seale, who have both made a mark in recent times with new technology rather than the creative surges evident in their early Australian works. It is no wonder that Dominik chose Australian musicians, Nick Cave and Warren Ellis, to lend a fabulous musical score, over American musicians.

In retrospect, this American film, shot in Canada, with all the Australian talent behind the camera, is different from other regular American films. Two remarkable directors, the Scott brothers—Ridley and Tony—have partly bankrolled the film. Evidently they had confidence in Dominik to make a rather unusual American film. Revisionist films have been made in the US but have never been highlighted by most film critics. A particular film that I would put in perspective is Abraham Polonsky’s less-fictional biography Tell Them Willie Boy is Here (1969) with Robert Redford, Katherine Ross and Robert Blake. Unfortunately, the talented Polonsky was blacklisted by the McCarthyists. Dominik need not have such fears as his film only looks inside minds of men and women, not the politics of bounty-killing.

Dominik has made an interesting film. I wish the mettle of the latter part of the film was evident in the earlier parts to make a viewer sit up from the beginning of the film. And last but not least, enjoy the unobtrusive music that adds to the richness of the film. A more pertinent evaluation of the film would be to focus on the word "coward" than the word "assassination" in the title of the film. If one reflects on the movie, it is basically a study of hero worship rather than of heroism or of cowardice. It is also a study of how the larger population reacts to heroes and what the journalists write about them. For a while the assassin is the hero for many; later he is not. Arguably, the film is not just about Jesse James or Robert Ford. It is about us.

Author's note: As this is is the hundredth movie discussed on this blog, I thank all the readers who have written to me with useful comments or words of encouragement.

99. Japanese director Yojiro Takita’s “Okuribito” (Departures) (2008): Amazing grace of handling dead bodies

2010-04-03T03:01:00.000-07:00

Many viewers would be touched by the tale of an aspiring cellist, who accidentally becomes a mortician (an undertaker or a funeral director, to some) when he loses his dream job with a symphony orchestra. Many would even be stupefied by the ingenuity of the filmmakers to pick up a seemingly unique subject such as “encoffinment” as a subject for a feature film. Many others would be in awe of the Asian traditions that respect the dead, the elderly, and the institution of marriage until (and beyond!) “death do us part”. Many others would be equally intrigued by the Asian traditions that consider associating any profession relating to the dead as being somewhat demeaning and not worthy of public stature.

Director Yojiro Takita’s film is loosely based on Aoki Shinmon’s autobiographical book The Coffin Man, which was subsequently adapted for the screen by the scriptwriter Kundo Koyama. While Takita and Koyama need to be complimented on deciding to bring to the big screen a heartwarming tale of a disappearing tradition of subcontracted morticians in Japan, there is the strange overpowering element of music that is pivotal to the somewhat mysterious organic development of the movie’s plot and in all probability this is obviously disconnected to Shinmon’s original tale. As I was intrigued as how the duo of Takita and Koyama added the powerful element of music to the tale, I stumbled on a detail available on the Internet that the lead actor in Departures, Masahiro Motoki, was a member of a band before he took to acting and that the film Departures was a direct outcome of the actor reading Shinmon’s book. Evidently, Motoki had much to do with development of the final Takita-Koyama collaborative effort.

The film is overtly an essay on the art of taking care of the dead under the gaze of family members and friends. It is also a film that details the dressing of the dead body while covered by sheets and the application of make-up on the corpse to make it resemble the best living memory of the dead person, all the while ensuring that there is no disrespect to the dead and living present in the room. Yet the movie offers much more entertainment and reasons to introspect than these facets of the script that could be attributed to Shinmon’s book. A sub-text of the film deals with reverse urban migration, of going back to the villages as urban employment becomes unpredictable and unstable under recession. Much later in the film there is mention of salmon returning upstream from the oceans to die. The metaphor becomes one of the many Shintoist references where life’s patterns can be understood by studying nature. Here is a movie that attempts to improve life and marital compatibility by having a closer look, not at death, but at the dead.

There is somber black humor—a lovely dead girl is discovered by the morticians to be a transsexual during the embalming; typos in advertisements hilariously bring the world of morticians close to that of travel agents; and the viewers are shown a coveted meal of an octopus, disappearing into the waters of a canal because those who were to devour it realize it the sea creature is still alive and then decide to release it into natural freedom. Dead or live octopus, the film is replete with comparisons of the dead with the living and vice-versa. It is not without a connection when later in the film an elderly mortician, a widower, speaks like a sage—“The living eat the dead, unless they are plants”—as he cooks a puffer roe, the size of a poultry egg, surrounded by live indoor plants and an image of his dead wife who he fondly remembers.

Takita’s Departures won the coveted Best Foreign Film Oscar and the Grand Prize at Montreal Film Festival apart from some 30 other awards. This would not be surprising for anyone whose hearts rule their minds. If one looks closely at the honors the film has garnered, these are basically for the director, the actors, and the sound technicians—all well deserved. Yet the mainstay of the film, for me, was the music composed by a talented Japanese called Joe Hisaishi, violinist and composer, who transformed parts of Beethoven’s 9th Symphony, Brahms’ Wiegenlied, and Bach’s Ave Maria as the basis of his own musical compositions for the film Departures. Joe Hisaishi is a stage name that the composer chose to indicate his fascination for the US composer Quincy Jones as Hisaishi is close to Quincy in written Japanese. Now Hisaishi is a name to watch for in film music as his music already has played a role to the success of at least three recent films—Spirited Away, Princess Mononoke, and restored sound version of 1920’s silent Buster Keaton’s The General. And surprisingly not one of the thirty plus awards has gone to the talented composer.

A keen viewer of the film will recall the scene in the film where the cellist finds a jagged stone next to his cello with the musical notes of a piece called The Wayfarer. I can only guess the piece of music relates to Mahler’s The Wayfarer, a song of grief sung by the singer waiting for the beloved. The film has a subplot of the cellist turned mortician coming to terms with disappearance of his father when he is quite young, but already showing flair to play the cello. When the cellist finally gets to meet his father after harboring hate towards his missing parent for most of his life, he finds out his father is dead with just a cardboard box of possessions to leave behind. He has to embalm his dead father, with his dead fingers clutching a symbolic smooth stone. The viewer is never told why the father left his wife, while we can guess that the father whose gifts to his only son ranged from written musical scores and stones, both rough and smooth, was in remote touch with his son, while the son takes time to put the pieces together. Finally, why did the filmmakers choose the cello over a violin or a viola for the lead character's favorite musical instrument? Avid filmgoers might get a likely answer to that question by viewing Fellini's under-rated classic Orchestra Rehearsal (Prova d'orchestra) made in 1978.

This Japanese film can be lauded for its many virtues—a fascinating subject that is ecumenical (as it shies away from being typically Shinto or Buddhist, while one of the dead has a Christian/Jewish name, Naomi), endearing performances from the lead actor Masahiro Motoki and Akira Kurosawa’s stock actor in later films Tsutomu Yamazaki (Kagemusha and High and Low), beautiful adaptation of western classical music, and finally an uplifting theme of how any job can elicit respect of others if done well. It is no wonder the Oscar voters loved it, as this Japanese film meets many of the values that Hollywood traditionally celebrates.

Yet after the watching the movie, I wondered if any of those who thought the Japanese film was unique had ever seen a brilliant Iranian mockumentary film called Bitter Dreams (Khab-e Talkh) (2004) which deals with a parallel story of “encoffinment” of dead Muslim bodies in Iran. While encomiums are well deserved for the director and scriptwriter of the Japanese film Departures, the gaping holes in the story makes you wonder how this film could beat its co-nominated French film Laurent Cantet’s The Class in the eventual Oscar race in 2009. The film never explains the sudden exit of the cellist father from his life though both his parents never remarried, and his mother retained his father’s music record collection. The film never explains the need for the implicit father-son communication through rocks, smooth and jagged, even though rocks occupy an importance in Shintoism. The film never clarifies why the jagged rock came wrapped in the notes of The Wayfarer. The film never explains why the octopus that was to be eaten is freed, when the same individuals eat and enjoy dead chicken. There is mention of death being a “gateway” in the film but there is no discussion of afterlife in the film. For me Departures could have more fulfilling if the trio of Takati, Motoki, and Koyama had developed the film a wee bit further developing the suggested Shinto imagery in the film of birds realigning their positions in formation flight, of stones, and of salmons. It would then have not just won the hearts of the viewers but also their minds. Then the deaths would truly be “food for thought” of the living.

P.S. The Iranian film Bitter Dreams and the French film The Class have earlier been reviewed on this blog. A trivia for those interested: Takati, Motoki, Hisaishi and Yamazaki are all December born!! Do they also think alike?

98. Iranian director Asghar Farhadi’s “Darbareye Elly” (About Elly) (2009): A vignette of modern Iranian society

2010-03-11T08:49:00.000-08:00

When a country such as Iran puts restrictions on its citizens' creativity, it is not surprising that great works of art emerge with a certain vengeance and vigor that free society rarely produce. We saw this in the former USSR, and cineastes were rewarded with the great works of Kozintsev, Tarkovsky and Parajanov. As I write this review, Jafar Panahi, another talented Iranian filmmaker, has been arrested. His friend and peer Abbas Kiarostami has appealed for his release. It is not surprising that the list of Iranian films winning recognition worldwide grows longer by the day.

About Elly won the Silver Bear (Best Director) award at Berlin, one of the top three festivals in the world. Apart from this recognition, the film has already won awards at four other lesser festivals (Asia-Pacific, Brisbane, Tribeca, and the International Film Festival of Kerala) and at Iran’s national festival at Fajr. It was Iran’s submission for the best Foreign Film at the 2010 Oscars.

What is the film about? As in the case of most Iranian films it has no sex or violence and yet provides clean entertainment for adults. It is a tale of how we view others, however close or distant we are. It’s a tale of value judgments we make in everyday life. Now these value judgments could often be colored by small lies or exaggerations that could leapfrog into greater problems that one could ever imagine.

The story line is basically of a young unmarried woman Elly who joins three families on a vacation to the Caspian Sea coastline of Iran. Elly has been invited by Sepideh to spend a night with the three families, Sepideh being one of the three wives in the group. The only relationship established between the two is that Elly teaches Sepideh’s child at school and that Elly could be paired off with one eligible divorced male in the group if the two get to like each other. While the elders are busy playing volleyball or away shopping, a child nearly drowns and is rescued. Elly, who was asked to keep an eye on the kids, disappears. Has she drowned? Has she left for the city as she had wanted to? Her mother, in Teheran, is not aware of where she is vacationing. Why is that?

The tale is cleverly developed from that point of Elly’s disappearance by Farhadi, who is also the co-author of the story and the screenplay-writer. There is another co-author of the tale, Iranian writer-director Azad Jafarian. Thankfully, the group tells the police only facts as they knew at that point of time. The lies emerge later. Even a well-intentioned joke that Elly is a newly wed, a joke stated to get access to an accommodation at the holiday spot spirals into complications later in the film. And so on. The film goes beyond social comment and a thriller. Relationships get shattered. In a way, it recalls the ending of Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s recent Turkish film Three Monkeys and easily could be called “Three Monkey Families.”

What nagged me was the situation in the film where parents enjoy themselves but do not keep an eye of their kids playing near the sea, until things go wrong. Is this modern Iran? Is this modern Asia?

Here is a film that has a very talented cast including Golshifteh Farhani, who plays the pivotal role of Sepideh. Ms Farhani is arguably one of the finest actresses from Iran. She has appeared in Mehrjui’s Santoori, Kiarostami’s Shirin and Ghobadi’s Half Moon. It was not surprising that Ridley Scott cast her in his 1979 film Body of Lies. It is not just actors that carry the film but the script and direction are noteworthy. For instance the film has a fascinating kite flying act by the film’s character Elly. The beautiful sequence forebodes the events that follow. Yet this is not the finest example of Iranian cinema. I prefer the works of Mehrjui among the many great filmmakers of modern Iran and, of course, Bitter Dreams, the brilliant debut film of the young Mohsen Amiryousefi. Unfortunately, Asgahr Farhadi, who is definitely an interesting filmmaker, has yet to make a film that can truly rub shoulders with the very best from that country.

While film deserves all the adulation it is receiving and will receive, Indian viewers will recall a similar tale filmed by an Indian director Mrinal Sen from a story by Ramapada Chowdhury. The film was called Ek din Achanak (1989) which competed at the Venice Film Festival some 20 years ago and even received an honorable mention from the jury. Like Elly disappears in About Elly, in Ek din Achanak, a professor and head (played by Dr Shreeram Lagoo) of a family, that included his two daughters and a son, suddenly disappears without explanation or trace. That Mrinal Sen film had also developed a parallel story to that of Farhadi.

While Farhadi’s work can be appreciated in isolation, Indian cineastes ought to compare and contrast the two works separated by 20 years. In December 2009, Mrinal Sen had inaugurated the 14th International Film Festival of Kerala where About Elly was in the competition section and eventually won the Golden Crow Pheasant for the best film. It would have been ironic if Sen was there to hand over the grand prize to Farhadi, which would have marked a 20-year cycle of similar ideas being presented on screen from two different filmmaking nations.

P.S. Two Iranian films Shirin and Bitter Dreams and the Turkish film Three Monkeys mentioned above have been reviewed on this blog earlier. Farhadi's later work Nader and Simin: A Separation has also been reviewed on this blog.

97. Indian maestro Mrinal Sen’s “Khandhar" or "Khandahar” (The Ruins) (1984): Touching sensibilities, tugging at our conscience

2010-02-19T10:45:00.000-08:00

My friends are amazed that I should rate a Mrinal Sen film among the very best in world cinema. In fact, there are two films of Mrinal-da that I rate very high—Oka oorie katha (a film in Telugu language based on the Munshi Premchand tale Kafan) made in 1977 and Khandhar (made in Hindi language). These are two films, for me, which raise the bar of quality of Indian cinema, decades after they were made.

Mrinal Sen is an acknowledged Leftist. Yet a viewer of Khandhar will not come across Communist propaganda or even a red flag. There are no political speeches. The Mrinal-da of the overtly political Chorus-that won awards at Moscow and Berlin festivals apart from top Indian national honors--and Calcutta ’71 cannot be recognized as such in Khandhar.

Why then do I rate Khandhar so high? Is it because it won the Golden Hugo at Chicago or the Special Jury Prize at Montreal film festivals? Is it because it won the Golden Lotus the highest national award in India and the best actress award that year? Is it because it had a talented ensemble cast of Naseeruddin Shah, Shabana Azmi, Annu Kapoor, Pankaj Kapur and Mrinal Sen’s wife Gita Sen? For me, Khandhar was fascinating because it was a point of departure for Sen the director of Chorus, who had matured as a filmmaker and had come to accept that true greatness lay within the ambits of understatements rather than overt statements, political, psychological or social.

The opening credits of the film roll as a smalltime still photographer develops his prints in his developing room in Calcutta. The last picture he develops is of the well-balanced image of a Bengali lass among the ruins of an old mansion, with moss and weeds threatening to overshadow brick and mortar. But you soon realize the tale relating to that photograph (captured on still and moving film by the late cinematographer K. K. Mahajan) is yet to follow. The photographer is a middle-class young bachelor. Adorning his studio wall is the awesome still photograph of thespian Vasudeva Rao in Mrinal Sen’s earlier film Oka Oorie Katha (the other favorite of mine from the Sen-Mahajan combine!).

The tale is simple. Three young men, including the photographer Subhash, decide to go to a distant village for a short vacation. One of the young men has an ancestral house tucked away in the interiors of West Bengal. Evidently the house once provided shelter to a rather rich owner. The former symbol of pelf and power has fallen to crass neglect by its few inhabitants to the extent that neither public transport nor electricity is within easy reach. Only god seems to be in touch—as there is a temple and a priest in the environs.

The denizens of the ruins include a caretaker and his visiting daughter (Sreela Majumdar), a bedridden blind widow (Gita Sen) and her quietly demure and faithful daughter (Shabana Azmi) who has been betrothed to a young man who has never returned to claim her for a wife for several years. And there is a white goat that this darling daughter tends, not unlike actress Irene Papas' character in Michael Caccoyannis’ (Mihalis Kakogiannis’) 1956 film Zorba the Greek.

The film could easily be viewed as an unrequited love story between an urban photographer and an intelligent beautiful village woman caught in a time warp. The interaction is brief between Subhash and Jamini but indelible not unlike Alexis and the Greek village girl with a goat in Caccoyannis’ cinematic gem. The words spoken are few between the two protagonists in Sen’s film but the emotions captured are endless. Even the ruins seem to speak..

But the questions the viewers would ask are many. Will the lovers meet again and marry? Probably, not. Is that what the film is all about? The film asks the viewer several questions indirectly. How many of us act according to the dictates of our conscience and our hearts? Most of us prefer not to act, not to rock the boat, not to swim against the current. And there are the hundreds of Jaminis, less beautiful and less intelligent, caught within the chains of honor, family ties, religion, birth, and financial constraints, who cannot truly bloom and show their true capacities and capabilities to the world. One can mistake them as shadows unless they are captured on film as Subhash/Mahajan/Sen did.

The true power of the film lies in its understatements. The chemistry between the two strangers comes alive when a well meaning Subhash tries to cheer a blind widow by pretending to be her future son-in-law. It’s a white lie. When a white lie is spoken, many characters in the film indicate their discomfort, yet no one acts. This is a situation that one encounters so often in life. We tend to question the liar, as in the film, but do not act ourselves.The film is a tale of meaning well but never actually getting down to changing the social, psychological and political status quo. It is somewhat like the clever editing in the film of a man tottering off a steep staircase, which Sen crisply follows up with another scene recording the sound of a bucket falling into a well to withdraw water. No one has fallen--we, the viewers, assumed it. That’s cinema that suggests more than the reality. Khandhar is a subtle film that packs a tough punch. Many might forget to note that this is arguably and deceptively the strongest political film that Sen ever made. The open ending actually helps the film further. A viewer might be forced to accept the ligitamacy of the main protagonist uttering a white lie to comfort an old blind woman. But how many will travel the whole nine yards to rescue the Jaminis of this world?

That Ms. Azmi won a national award for this role would not surprise anyone. But then a perceptive viewer will note that most of the actors in this film were trained in acting schools and could etch out their roles with a depth rarely associated with Indian cinema. The performers were not providing eye candy for the viewers or mere theatrics. Here was an example of restrained, yet detailed evocation of inner turmoil. (The only sore thumb was when Sen used the celebrated actor Om Puri's voice for a minor character in the film.) Both Sen and Azmi were at their finest fettle in this film. It is a story co-written by Premendra Mitra whose story Kapurush was used by another giant of Indian cinema Satyajit Ray. It is important for cineastes to note that Mrinal Sen is one the only Indian filmmaker to win awards at almost all the major festivals of the world--Berlin, Cannes, Moscow, Karlovy Vary, Chicago and Montreal--and an honorable mention at Venice.

96. Japanese maestro Mikio Naruse’s "Yama na Oto" (Sound of the Mountain/The Echo) (1954): Underlining profound Asian sensibilities

2010-02-08T06:49:00.000-08:00

Mikio Naruse’s cinema will appeal to many as it hits sensitive spots in the hearts and the minds of the viewer without resorting to the impressive tools of modern cinema, specifically special effects, stylized camerawork and use of sound and music, which contemporary film directors fall back on to mesmerize audiences. Naruse’s cinema is unpretentious, recalling the works of Satyajit Ray. Most cinema lovers forget the trio of Japanese masters who contributed a great deal to world cinema--Kurosawa, Ozu and Naruse. Unfortunately, Naruse was the least exposed of the trio to Indian and western audiences but he enjoyed domestic recognition. Decades later, critics are rediscovering Naruse.

The story line of Yama na Oto might not make audiences of the Western world sit up. That is because the concept of strong women characters holding families together is never a selling theme in the Americas and Europe.

This Naruse film is all about family values. The male head of the father is concerned about his son who is leading a wayward life after marriage. He is equally concerned about his daughter with two children of her own who is struggling to keep her marriage from falling apart. While most western audiences and audiences in Westernized Japan might accept this changing male attitude, tradition and values are important for the old man and a considerable cross section of Japanese society even today. The relationship of a woman towards her parents-in-law is another aspect etched out with care in this film. Here, the daughter-in-law is devoted to her parents to a fault and the parents-in-law reciprocate that by showering love and respect for her. However, the underlying tension that Naruse builds up is between a wayward husband and a dutiful, smiling wife, efficient and gracious to all who encounter her.

This Naruse film is also paean to the virtues of being an intelligent woman, sensitive to all family members who depend on her. At the same time, this is not a doll toiling away in the kitchen but a person who can take incredible mature decisions by herself without consulting others of whether she should procreate within a bad marriage or continue to hold the marriage and defy the wishes of her doting parents-in-law.

For cineastes who loved Kurosawa’s Ikuru, the final shot of Naruse’s Yama na Oto would strike a chord as father and daughter-in-law walk away, almost hand in hand from the camera. The camera makes you realize ironically that they are two remrakable individuals who in another life would have made a great couple, if they were not separated by age. (In Ikuru, it was the tragedy of a single, lonely individual captured in a bleak winter. Both images invite comparison and contrast.) Human relationships can be truly wonderful when one gets to appreciate the moral strengths of individuals that often lie hidden as though their real faces were behind a Noh (Japanese theater form) mask. This, incidentally, is a subject of conversation in the film Yama na Oto. A mature worldly face can change into an angelic childish face with the aid of a mask. Somehow the final shot of Yama na Oto made me recall the the end of the somewhat contemporary 1997 French film Nettoyage à sec (Dry cleaning) where the relationship of a married couple is examined through a cathartic finale, using Occidental values of cinema. Even Lars von Trier's The Anti-Christ does the same. But these examples of Occidental cinema rely on sex and violence to communicate with the viewer--a necessity which Naruse consciously rejects.

It is this aspect that the erudite American film critic Susan Sontag found most interesting in this film. Not the Noh mask but the performance of the lead actress is what she found amazing. Sontag found the performance of the Setsuko Hara in this film one of the finest performances ever on screen. If you see this film, you will concur with Sontag, as the lady is able to transform from a childlike angelic personality into a strong-willed modern woman. She not only surprises her on-screen father-in-law but the audience who never expect the events that follow. Naruse and Hara are truly amazing as they weave magic.

Naguse’s peer Akira Kurosawa once stated “(In the films of Naruse,) a flow of shots that looks calm and ordinary at first glance reveals itself to be like a deep river with a quiet surface disguising a fast-raging current.” To some the film might remain as a great adaptation of a popular Nobel Prize winning Yasunari Kawabata's novel, which I have not read. But to others like me it is true cinema, the images, the acting and direction, which in combination makes the film a treat to watch.

I do wish that TV channels and DVD stores make films of Naruse, Ozu, Mizoguchi, and Kurosawa more accessible to viewers worldwide. Here’s a film on sex and marriage without any sex on screen. Here’s a film on character and morals. Here’s a film on true heroism—the story of an ordinary housewife, not a swashbuckling hero on horseback! Even in black and white, this 1954 film for me will remain a major work of cinema.

95. Cuban director Tomas Alea’s "La última cena" (The Last Supper) (1976): A remarkable, trenchant Cuban classic

2010-01-31T07:52:00.000-08:00

Cuban cinema does not often deal with religion; it is more at home with Leftist ideals. Its pro-Communist subjects have probably led prominent Western film critics to stay away from discussing major works of cinema by Tomas Alea and Humberto Solas. Cuban cinema rarely made waves in Hollywood circles. Yet Alea’s 1994 Cuban film Strawberry and Chocolate did manage to make the final Oscar foreign film shortlist, which is an unusual milestone for Cuban cinema.

Since many Cubans remain devout Roman Catholics, for any Cuban filmmaker working within the Communist regime any reference to any religion in a Cuban film has to first get official blessings. Tomas Alea, having already made two major films Memories of Underdevelopment and Death of a Bureaucrat, was widely accepted as a Cuban hero of cinema and could afford to play with religious themes without raising the ire of the Communist leaders in Cuba.

So Alea decided to make a film using the metaphor of Jesus’ Last Supper with his 12 Apostles by crafting an interesting feature film around a historical event that took place in Cuba at the end of the 19th century, where a white slave owner with a conscience decides to wash the feet of 12 of his black slaves and host a lavish dinner for them. The event is timed to coincide with the Passion Week Thursday (or Maundy Thursday). The film is broken into the segments--Ash Wednesday, Maundy Thursday, Good Friday and Easter Sunday. The real event was first captured in the historical book written a certain Moreno Fraginals, which I have not read. Alea used the book as the basis of this film. I am not sure how much of the intellectual credit of this cinematic work rests with Fraginals and how much with Alea and his co-scriptwriter Maria Eugenia Haya.

For the Communists, the entire film is a dark tale of slave owners and slaves, of black slaves toiling hard to make their owners rich and powerful. Alea uses the tale as a metaphor for the eventual escape and liberation of one slave on Easter Sunday in line with the Resurrection of Christ. But I found the film offers much more than the simple tale of the liberation of three types of the oppressed--one a slave, one a Spanish priest, and one a cross-bred colored sympathizer of the slaves who earned a living working for the slave owners.

Alea, just as another Leftist screenwriter Robert Bolt did in Rolland Joffe's Hollywood movie The Mission, is able to pinpoint the duplicity of the Church that gave implicit sanction for slavery to flourish. In The Last Supper, Alea seesaws between the somewhat contradictory portrayals of the priest first as a clown (the object of mirth for both women and slaves) and later as a more respectable individual, if he was to be compared to the slave owners. A similar ambiguity can be seen during the opening credits when Alea mischievously zooms in on a religious painting and gets the cinematographer to first show the religious figures in the clouds but later zooms in and lingers on the roses and thorns nearer terra firma. All this is shown with delightful negro voices singing a superb uplifting spiritual classical chorus on the soundtrack.

In the film, Alea presents three types of the Cuban population, the white slave owners, the black slaves and the colored cross bred population (represented by the sugar miller). Alea’s astute script shows the changes in the perception of all three communities during the Passion Week. A slave gains freedom and is able to resurrect in his own way on Easter Sunday. A religious Spanish slave owner who wants to emulate Christ and seek pardon for his sins, soon transforms into a monster when the slaves truly seek freedom that he granted days ago. A Spanish Catholic priest is buffeted between God and 'Caeser' (the slave owners who provide the Church its money). He is shown departing from the sugar estate, a broken man.

However, the real high point of the film is the brilliant dialectical conversations between the slave owner and the 12 slaves during the last supper on Maundy Thursday. It is a thought-provoking debate on what constitutes real happiness. One African slave talks of how he himself sold his father into slavery for the sake of money, and later how he himself was sold as a slave by others in his own family. Similarly, there is a trenchant reference to Judas and his treachery that could have deeper meanings as the slave who is liberated is the Judas equivalent in the film--a comment that would come close to the theological discussions of Martin Luther, Thomas Aquinas, and St Augustine of Hippo.

While many viewers will see the film as a slave vs. slave-owner tale, the film throws up more trenchant morsels that make you think. Why does an African tribal sell his own father for money? Why does money and wealth corrupt all of us so much that family relationships seem less important? Most tales of slavery put the blame squarely on Europeans and other wealthy races who subjugate others to acquire more pelf. But Alea's film/Fraginal's book shows the evil lurks in all of us, including the African slaves.

The film also encourages the viewer to look at freedom vs. slavery more closely. When a slave is given freedom he prefers his world of slavery--just as a long-serving prisoner is more comfortable behind bars than in the complex world of freedom and its constant demands on life.

Even more interesting is how the European slave owner switches from intellectual piety to extreme cruelty and intolerance. What is this dualism in each of us? The film will provoke many who care to reflect on the contents--the Judas question being the most profound one of all.

This Cuban film is arguably the finest work of Alea on par with his brilliant black comedy The Death of a Bureaucrat. And since Alea is considered the most important Cuban director, this film could well be considered as one of the the finest Cuban works on celluloid. The moot question is whether Alea was deliberately raising moral, theological, and psychological questions beyond the typical "revolution of the oppressed" Leftist chorus or did he stumble on a book/script that asked those questions? In the case of Rolland Joffe's The Mission, it is quite evident that scriptwriter Bolt was the astute thinker while Joffe was quite at sea at how to put together Bolt's vision. In this case, Alea puts across all the questions to the patient and perceptive viewer. But does the credit go to the filmmaker alone or to the historian or perhaps the scriptwriter?

I was viewing the film at the 14th International Film Festival of Kerala (within a section paying homage to the most important works in Cuban cinema) after a time lapse of some 30 years following its screening in Bangalore, India, in the1980 Filmostsav. Alea was present at that 1980 screening and I had the honor of interviewing him as a film critic. Alea kept telling me that as an Indian who who did not know the Spanish language, I was missing subtle innuendoes in the script with the differences in the Spanish spoken by the slave owners (European Spanish) and what was spoken by the others (Cuban Spanish) in the film. For me, the film remains a great work that offers considerable fodder for thought beyond the obvious storyline. It has not paled with time.

94. French maestro Jacques Rivette’s “Around a Small Mountain (36 vues du Pic Saint Loup)" (2009): Deceptively simple cinema

2009-12-23T20:03:00.000-08:00

To appreciate Rivette’s cinema one has to look beyond the obvious show—in this particular case a traveling circus in France, a circus that attracts less than a handful of people each night. And they don’t even laugh at the clowns. So when some does laugh, the laugh itself is a show stopper!

At the 14th International Film Festival of Kerala, many viewers of the 81-year-old French film director Jacques Rivette’s latest work Around a Small Mountain trooped out midway. The die-hard Rivette fans, some 60% of the audience, remained in their seats to the very end. The film is not everyone’s cup of tea.

Rivette’s cinema, in the case of Around a Small Mountain and all the films that he has made in the past has a mix of comedy, romance and mystery. In Around a Small Mountain, the comedy is obvious even to a village idiot but its relevance is what one is forced to ruminate on. What make one laugh at a clown in a circus, and why does another person not react to the same clown for the very same action? Comedy for the French includes tragedy—there is a thin vein of that element as well in this work of Rivette as in all his earlier films.

In India, filmgoers are familiar with the theme, if they have watched Raj Kapoor’s Mera Naam Joker. The only difference was that Raj Kapoor spoon-fed his audiences with ideas he wanted convey. In contrast, Rivette does it with style and discretion for the audience to figure out the latent, subtle meanings.

Around a small mountain is also a tale of romance. A mysterious handsome Italian man (Sergio Castellitto) fixes the car of a stranded elderly retired French circus artist (Jane Birkin), while she is stranded on a lonely road. The Italian fixes her car without uttering a word. This sequence is amazing. The seeds of romance are thrown. One would expect the woman to fall in love with this knight in an expensive sports car. But the reverse happens. That’s Rivette’s cinema.

Birkin has aged and is almost unrecognizable, if one recalls her roles in the French New Wave film of the Sixties. (Birkin is the real life mother of the lead actress in The Anti-Christ), For Birkin fans, she walks on a tight rope, a foot above ground in a fabulous single shot. There are no stunt doubles for her!

There is mystery as well. The Italian stranger remains an enigma. Who is he? There is also a mysterious death in the history of the circus troupe, which is unraveled slowly.

It is also a tale of chance—chance encounters where two individuals meet by accident. There is the frumpy Kate (Birkin) wearing clothes that make her look older than she is and a younger Vittorio who is in elegant casuals. Rivette drives home the opposites.

But at the end of the movie, the viewer has to figure out the obvious question. The circus troupe with just three or four persons for an audience cannot be real or cost effective. So how real is the circus? The director is using the concept as he would use theatre as another tool to tell us another aspect of our lives. The English title of the film is Around a Small Mountain (the French title is 36 vues du Pic Saint Loup). There is a mountain captured in the film’s opening shots. Evidently much of the action takes place in its environs. But to an intelligent viewer, Rivette’s mountain is not the physical one. It is a metaphor for the leading lady’s dark memories.

This is an unusually short film of Rivette (under 90 minutes) in contrast to his other films that last 2 hours on average. One could argue at length if this is Rivette's best work yet. But one cannot deny that this is a significant contribution to cinema. It was nominated for the Golden Lion at Venice Festival.

There were cat calls during the show from viewers who would have preferred a Raj Kapoor style of direction. But Rivette’s cinema is to be enjoyed at a different level altogether. One has to remember the circus was a mere prop for a 81 year old master filmmaker to tell a tale of life, where one (here the Birkin character, Kate) runs away from realities but return to same place to recognize them anew. The film for me reflected W.B.Yeats poetry “And the end of all our exploring will be to arrive at where we began and to know the place for the first time.”

93. Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami’s "Shirin" (2008): Audacious experimentation that’s awesome

2009-12-21T09:57:00.000-08:00

No feature film has ever been made this way.

Shirin, the latest work of Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami is based on a love myth of Khusrow and Shirin, a literary 12th century love saga of a prince and a young woman named Shirin, a tragic tale cutting across the borders of Persia and Armenia. And then again, the film is not about the love saga because you don’t see the film, you only hear the sounds of an elegantly made film and see the corresponding light and darkness of the virtual film falling on the faces of 114 of the best actresses in Iran and of Juliette Binoche, a famous French actress of cinema. What you hear is what would be a delightful radio drama of the tale made into film that you never get to see. What you see instead is a canvas of beautiful women emoting to this virtual film.

The film Shirin is an audacious experiment, in which for 92 minutes you are subjected to watching the faces of different women in a movie hall watching a movie of the tragic love tale of Shirin and her two lovers Khusrow and Farhad, one is a prince and the other a sculptor. The interesting trivia you need to know is that during the packed screening of the film at the 14th International Film Festival of Kerala that the entire audience stayed enraptured in their seats for 92 minutes of the film without a single cat-call, totally in awe of what was happening. Earlier, delegates, like me, had stood in line hours in advance and many had to go back disappointed unable to enter the theatre.

For those who have not heard of Abbas Kiarostami--he is a 69-year-old poet, photographer, painter, graphic designer, screenplay-writer, film editor and an art director of films.

Two questions bounce at you while watching Shirin.

Are there any men in the film? There are two men Khusrow and Farhad, in the virtual film that we only hear voices of. However, in the filmed audience too there are men but you see them in rows behind the female faces. Kiarostami has made a film on the reactions of women towards a famous tragic epic poem. Tears flow, eyes look way and then back again, each subtle movement capturing the emotions of the viewer. Obviously, the director is not interested in the men’s reactions. He is interested in the women’s reactions. This becomes apparent towards the end when the virtual film is heard stating “There is a Shirin in all women..” or words to that effect.

Will such a film ever make money? It is a minimalist film that would surprise even the most dyed-in-the-wool cineaste. Once you are inside a film hall watching Kiarostami, you are hypnotized. You would not leave the hall. I did not, nor did the hundreds who saw the film with me, some sitting on the aisles. But the moot question is would I have come to see the film in the first place, if I was aware of what I was going to see? Probably not, having assumed that it would be boring experience. Yet having seen the film, I would state otherwise.

Kiarostami is a genius, an audacious one. He has realized one fact. The audience matters as much as the story. Therefore, you need to look through the camera-eye at your audience. Through close-ups. In a way, the entire film is an ode to close-ups in cinematography. It is a also a formidable work of editing, one could point out the range of emotions do not include laughter and contentment. Theatre directors and film directors all know the importance of their audiences. After all they succeed or fail because of the audience. Here's a film that captures the all important audience through close-ups. Kiarostami the filmmaker turns into a psychiatrist and a Svengali of the audience instead of the actor!

This work of Kiarostami is at a deeper level capturing the fears and hopes of the average Iranian through a catharsis of a movie watching experience. Had he used only the ugly faces of Iran’s women this might not have worked but actresses like Golshifte Farahani (Sepideh of About Elly) and Niki Karimi (The Hidden) are faces of the gifted beautiful women, whose faces never make the audience of Shirin look away.

Kiarostami and Dariush Mehrjui are great filmmakers on par with best in the world. Kiarostami set up a famous film institute when Mehrjui made his famous film Gaav (the Cow). That institute can take the credit of being instrumental in making Iranian classics like Naderi's The Runner. But these film-makers can never be taken granted and have to work within a system that reduces the scope of what they can film as subjects. Documentary and fiction merge often in Kiarostami’s cinema just as it does in Shirin. So do themes of love and death. That too plays a role in Shirin.

Try to catch up with this film—because it is a totally different experience you’re not likely to forget. It is on one plane a folk tale, on another a tale of what makes an audience react the way they do, on yet another the options of entertainment for a woman in Iran how she reacts to those limited options, and finally how a clever director can manipulate the audience.

P.S. Some major Iranian films including Gaav and The Runner have been discussed earlier on this blog.

92. Polish director and scriptwriter Urszula Antoniak's debut film "Nothing Personal" (2009): Amazing tale on solitude beautifully told

2009-12-20T02:37:00.000-08:00

Solitude is often craved for by individuals who are thinkers (and sometimes by misanthropes, due to their personal past experiences). It is a state that monks and people spiritually inclined love to enjoy at some stage in their lives. It is an accepted life stage in Hindu religious practice and certain Buddhist and Jain traditions. Gertrude Stein wrote on solitude "When they are alone they want to be with others, and when they are with others they want to be alone. After all human beings are like that." Nothing Personal is a very interesting film that reflects Ms Stein's thoughts. It begins with a woman who for unknown reasons gives away all her worldly possessions and leaves on a journey to nowhere. In a secluded spot in Ireland, another man--a widower--lives alone valuing his solitary life. Yet, he realizes that he could do with some hired help to tend his garden. The two individuals meet but do their lives change? The Irish-Dutch film directed by a Polish director explores the theme with remarkable results.

Polish director and scriptwriter Urszula Antoniak, currently living in Holland, is someone to watch out for in the future landscape of world cinema if Nothing Personal is an indicator of her capabilities. I have a soft corner for any talented debut filmmaker who relies on his/her own story and script. Ms Antoniak is one such director revealing her potential of greater works to come.

Nothing Personal, a very recent Irish-Dutch co-production, making its Indian premiere at the 14th International Film Festival of Kerala, had its audience clapping away at some delightfully composed shots by cinematographer Daniel Bouquet and director Antoniak, conjured for the viewer. It is without doubt a nugget of a film. Ms Antoniak deservedly won the best first feature of a director award at Locarno Film Festival. The film has won an incredible tally of 10 awards already, 6 of which came at the Locarno film Festival itself in Italy.

Lotte Verbeek, a Dutch actress with a magnetic screen presence, plays a young attractive Dutch woman who discards all her material possessions in Holland one fine day and watches strangers pick up the material from the window of her apartment. She is shown wearing a wedding ring, which she is shown removing. Evidently, she was once married but there is no mention of her past or of her marriage as the film unspools. Ms Verbeek won the Silver Leopard best actress award at Locarno Film Festival portraying the main role of a young woman with no money, backpacking from Holland to an unknown beautiful desolate spot in Ireland with no apparent purpose with all the qualities of a misanthrope. During the film, Ms Verbeeck’s demeanor gradually changes from the unfriendly to the affable and then back to her old self. The changes in her character that are subtle are truly a treat to watch. Like Ms Antoniak, we can be sure that Ms Verbeek, too, will be talked about in the future.

Director and scriptwriter Antoniak presents an enigmatic character with minimal spoken conversations. But when words are spoken the carefully chosen words provide a lot of meaning. The woman is distrustful of men, who possibly mean her no harm, and rude to women who want to get know her or even help her. The woman feeds herself by checking out trash bins for left-over food. On reaching a scenic spot in Ireland by apparent chance, she spots a lonely house of rich owner. When the owner, a well-to-do genial old widower, returns to the house, he offers her food. She is initially rude to him as well. The two come to an arrangement where she would work for food, but refuses to reveal her name or speak a word of who she is. Throughout the film she is addressed as “You’ by the house-owner Martin after she says he can call her ‘You ‘ The deal is food for work, but no discussion on personal matters. Hence, the title of the film--Nothing Personal.

The film is essentially about the relationship that is built over the days between the two. Both are individuals who, for their own reasons, like to be alone. Both, it is gradually revealed, are well-educated and cultured Europeans. The back-packer with no money is capable of making haute cuisine when she chooses and is well versed with good music and books. What follows is a gripping tale of appreciation of solitude, not because one hates people and their friendships, but because they value their own space and time without intrusions from others. Yet, even such people can value companionship when they find people of a similar vein.

This film will provide a great boost for Irish cinema. The film showcases yet another commendable performance from Irish actor of repute Stephen Rea, who had a major role in the award-winning film The Crying Game. It will also serve as a great advertisement for Irish tourism with its fascinating locales liile known to potential tourists.

Without revealing the end of the film, I would advise all viewers of this film to pay attention to the sound and visual details throughout the film. A perceptive viewer will truly enjoy the remarkable epilogue of the film, which tells an aspect of the story that the film does not reveal right up to that point of the tale.

P.S. I recommend an interesting interview by Boyd van Hoeij with the director Ms Antoniak published a fortnight ago available on http://cineuropa.org/ffocusinterview.aspx?lang=en&documentID=115800&treeID=2061

91. British director Stephen Frears’ “The Hit” (1984) (UK): Dissecting duality in personalities

2009-12-02T18:34:00.000-08:00

Often filmmakers unconsciously choose subjects and scripts that they find interesting, unaware of links between the subjects. My guess is that the three films that I have picked to discuss--all made by a single film director--were never meant to be a conscious trilogy and yet these have all the markings of three separate films that present a similar theme from the same individual. The filmmaker under discussion is Stephen Frears and it is quite possible that he himself would be surprised at the pattern he drew in the three films.

Three films of British filmmaker Stephen Frears require to be reassessed decades after they were made and, arguably, forgotten by many. The most enigmatic of the trio would be The Hit (1984), followed by Hero (1992) with Dustin Hoffman in the lead role, and finally Mary Reilly (1996) with Julia Roberts, John Malkovich, and Glenn Close. All the three movies have a common thread that would be apparent, if they are evaluated closely as group or as work of an auteur of cinema. All three, written by three different novelists and three different screenplay writers are essentially Frears’ cinematic essays on contradictory personalities in an individual, and then the perception of this duality by various less important characters within each story unfolding on screen and, ultimately, by us the viewers. If one realizes that Frears is a law graduate from Trinity College, London, the approach he takes on the three distinct tales is similar to a lawyer’s arguments presented to you, the viewer, as the judge and jury.

Frears' Mary Reilly was the most obvious example among the three films examining the black and the white aspects of human beings, because it was based on Valerie Martin’s novel which in turn was revisiting the Robert Louis Stevenson theme of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, essentially presenting the Stevenson tale from the point of view of Jekyll’s housemaid, Mary Reilly (played by Julia Roberts). This tale was further processed by screenplay-writer Christopher Hampton, whose screenplays credits include Atonement, Carrington and Dangerous Liaisons. And Stephen Frears added his cinematic stamp in the opening shots of the film with Julia Roberts on her knees, with the not-so-innocent camera encircling her from above giving the viewer a starter dish to savor, of both the watcher and the watched, heralding the meaty story that unfolds. Towards the end of the film, the viewer would wonder who was ultimately watching whom in the story.

Mary Reilly is no ordinary dumb housemaid. She observes and grasps changes in her environment. She even contemplates on what she grasps as a philosopher. Note the words of Mary Reilly in the movie `Where does this come from, this rage?' which are strangely the lines echoed by director Terrence Malick in his mesmerizing film The Thin Red Line made just 3 years later. Mary Reilly is talking about the dark side of man; so is Malick, only in his case, the context is war.

The words of Mr Hyde to Mary Reilly: `Would you like to stay for awhile, or has my sense of smell betrayed me?' is an example of verbal sexual play in the film that makes the Hampton screenplay notable. It reminds you of another dark contemporary film: Perfume-the story of a murderer, another film made many years after Mary Reilly.

Or take this intriguing line from the same Frears film. Asks Mary Reilly: “He said you had an ailment. What sort of ailment is it?” Answers Dr Jekyll: “You might call it a fraction of my soul. Something that left me with a taste for oblivion.” 'Fraction of the soul' is indeed a great way to describe the three Frears films.

And some four years before Mary Reilly, Frears had made a film in the US called Hero that had uncomfortable questions thrown at viewers on the basic concept of heroism and the associated values and contradictions. Can a petty thief be a hero? That was the thought-provoking question asked by a threesome--Oscar-winning writers Alvin Sargent and David Peoples, and another distinguished Hollywood author Laura Ziskin--in Frears' Hero. Bernie, a pickpocket, played by Dustin Hoffman, anonymously rescues people from a plane crash site forcing the viewer of the film to come to terms with the subtle line dividing our perception of heroism and crime in the context of one individual. Another character, Bubber (Andy Garcia), more pleasing to the viewer’s eye than Bernie, is an otherwise noble individual who does the reverse by opting to impersonate the real hero. They are clever alter egos of each other. Another "fraction of the soul." It is like asking the viewer to choose between a Jekyll and a Hyde in either of the two individuals while the film is ostensibly a satire on hypocrisy on the media today.

But Frears’ fascination for the dichotomy of the human personality is arguably best portrayed in his earlier film The Hit. This Frears' film had the trappings of a conventional thriller or a road movie. However, Frears and the writer and scriptwriter Peter Prince delivered a jawbreaking punch at the viewer’s perception an individual's approach to inevitable death in the near term. Another "fraction of the soul" to quote the lines from Mary Reilly. The Hit is a film that could be dismissed as a mere thriller were it not for this cat and mouse game on screen revolving around mortal fear and the clever game between the filmmakers and the audience. Frears and Prince flesh out a character named Willie Parker (Terence Stamp), a hood who squeals on his mates and in return the British judicial system gives him a new life in Spain, complete with a fulltime bodyguard. The hood spends his days in exile reading books. The hood it appears has gradually transformed into a well-read philosopher. It is at this time that he is abducted by two hit-men (fascinating performances from John Hurt and Tim Roth) hired by the gangsters who had to go to prison because of Parker’s testimony.

To most viewers, the film would provide interest because of the excitement the film offers during the abduction and the various events that unfold as the prisoner is taken in a car from Spain to France for his eventual execution on Paris by those he had squealed on. But Frears and Prince present a film on a gangster, who by his recent exposure to books, can mock impending death.

Here is a sample conversation:

The young hit-man Myron (Tim Roth) “You've got nothing to smile about mate, if you knew.”

Willie Parker:”If I knew?”

Willie Parker to the senior hit-man Braddock (John Hurt): “He thinks I don’t know”

And much later Parker tells young Myron about his views on death “It's just a moment. We're here. Then we're not here. We're somewhere else... maybe. And it's as natural as breathing. Why should we be scared?”

Answers young Myron: “I think you're crazy, but I admire your attitude.”

Now it is this attitude that makes his otherwise cold-blooded captors defer killing him. Early in the movie it is the youger hit-man Myron who wants to kill the cool Parker and Braddock intervenes.

It is this attitude that makes the audience gradually admre Parker. Frears and Prince transform a hood into a hero not just for the hit-men on screen but for us the viewers. There is an awesome shot captured by Frears of Parker enjoying the view of a waterfall, seemingly at peace with himself as would a Tibetan monk, not characteristic of a man about to be executed. It is definitely one of the finest performances of Terence Stamp on screen. Even the senior hit-man Braddock is shaken by Parker's demeanor.

The trouble is that Frears and Prince have made a film that makes it almost impossible to admire Parker, except for two pivotal instances in the film which can be missed out, if you the viewer even blinks. Frears development of the character of Willie Parker is as distinguished as another British filmmaker John Boorman’s character Walker (played by Lee Marvin) in his US film Point Blank (1967). Both characters, Parker and Walker, are goons--yet the two directors presented us with characters larger than life, admirable for limited screen time.

The Hit is more than an interesting study of the personality of Parker. Three other characters in the film also exude elements of dual personalities themselves. The only woman of note in the film, Maggie, is a woman, who states that she does not know English sufficiently but this lie is exposed through a trick. The two hit-men are not made of steel either--each present vignettes of their characters that contradict the obvious veneer.

If you evaluate the three Frears’ films, each provides value beyond their screen time as the viewer can reflect on the subjects presented on screen. Each film presents two sides of a coin. Often these individuals are not likeable individuals but there is a certain magnetism that they exude on screen. And each film has a moment or two where you realize that what you see and associate with goodness or braveness can be deceptive. It could bother a perceptive viewer, and perhaps that is one reason these films did not make the box office jingle.

One wonders if Frears is continuing to build on the same theme in more films.

P.S. The film is not just an important collaboration between a director and scriptwriter but a film that offers three memorable performances from Terence Stamp, John Hurt and Tim Roth. John Hurt’s performance as the hit-man Braddock won him the best actor award at The Evening Standard British Film Awards and shared the honor with Terence Stamp and Tim Roth at the Mystfest (Italy) awards for The Hit. Two films mentioned above--The Thin Red Line and Perfume--have been reviewed earlier on this blog.

90. US director Terrence Malick’s “The Thin Red Line" (1998): “What’s this war in the heart of nature?”

2009-10-02T08:50:00.000-07:00

If I were to state that the most interesting filmmaker alive and making films today is an American named Terrence Malick, the statement is likely to be met with stares, dead silence, or some incredulous query like “What, not Steven Spielberg?”

Who is this Malick? Unlike his American peer Spielberg, who has made over 30 well-received movies, Malick has only made four. By the number game, Malik is a loser. Unlike Spielberg, whose bearded face and personal details are splashed all over countless newspapers and magazines, even the resourceful Time magazine had trouble locating a recent photograph of Malick, notorious for eluding journalists and for including “no personal publicity clauses” incorporated in his contracts with movie studios. And unlike Spielberg who dropped out of his Long Beach University course, Malick has attended Harvard and Oxford Universities, is a Rhodes Scholar and has even taught philosophy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). While Spielberg has won a clutch of Oscars, his fortune at Cannes, Berlin and Venice film festivals has been dismal. Venice finally gave him a lifetime achievement award. On the other hand, Malick has never won an Oscar but has won the prestigious Best Director award at Cannes for Days of Heaven and the Golden Bear for The Thin Red Line in the respective main competition sections. Arguably Malick is better received in Europe than in his home country or perhaps he is the toast of the cognoscenti rather than the Hollywood studio regulars, who vote at the Oscar polls. And, agewise, both Malick and Spielberg are in their sixties.

But why compare Spielberg with Malick or chalk with cheese? In 1999, the two directors’ works seemed to converge briefly when Malick’s The Thin Red Line and Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan, both films on the Second World War, competed for the Oscars. While Spielberg’s film picked up many Oscar statuettes, Malick’s work had to remain content with the seven unsuccessful nominations for the statuette. (Seven Oscar nominations for a single film indicates a substantial following even within the Hollywood system.) All of Malick’s films have won critical acclaim internationally and, not surprisingly, had to be content with a remarkably slow but gradually encouraging response at the box office. Why is that? While the studios were initially aghast with the poor reception from the general public, the latest data indicate that The Thin Red Line picked up over a 60% profit world-wide to date, quite in contrast to the initial assessments.

Many viewers paid good money to view Malick’s The Thin Red Line with the implicit expectation of enjoying the typical Hollywood war movie, replete with heroics and muscle-flexing. Many walked out of a film that had the flow of a meandering documentary, without a gripping plot, heartwarming heroics or even an explicit closure, associated with an average Hollywood product. It was never marketed by the distributers as a different type of war film. In contrast to the regular war film, Malick’s film presented a metaphysical perspective of war, a haunting evocation of man’s existential woes and the philosophic human condition of incomprehensibility, relegating the James Jones novel as a mere tool to present a movie that seemed to use a new film grammar that is rarely taught in film schools. This film unfolds with voice-over commentaries, often with the commentator never appearing on screen. Malick uses voice-overs, music and natural sounds heard in the outdoors to provide entertainment that urges audiences to think and react in timed dosages, somewhat like time-release medication. For instance, how many war films from Hollywood could have this philosophical line spoken as voiceover: “This great evil, where is it come from? How did it steal into the world? From what seed, what root did it spring? Who is doing this?”

Malick’s The Thin Red Line invites the viewers to move away from the James Jones novel and gently encourages them to reflect on many wars, one on screen, the wars between different types of individuals, and the war between man and nature, first through the minds of the individuals on screen, and subsequently nudging the minds of the viewer. This is best captured by the evocative poster of the film--an eye that peers through helmets of soldiers at the enemy. Though this war movie has guns and gore, it transcends guns as it focuses on the minds of men wearing those helmets just as the final shot is of a coconut seedling on an empty beach arguably signifying remergence of life and hope after man-made wars.

To the impatient viewer, The Thin Red Line would appear to be an unfinished film. In contrast, the same film is a wonderful experience for the reflective, patient viewer. I am reminded of my favorite Will Durant quote that the “more and more we know, we realize we know less and less.” Part of Malick’s unfinished flourishes, I believe, comes from his philosophic perspective, in contrast to regular Hollywood cinema that spoon-feeds the viewer with images of heroism or cowardice, ensuring the viewer leaves the movie hall gratified that the film ratifies the core values the viewer holds. European cinema on the other hand very often tends to either question the accepted norm or present a different view

Malick’s film is a radical departure from the accepted norms of cinema. There is no room for sentimentality. The film looks objectively at heroes and cowards, victors and vanquished, flora and fauna, life and death, the developed world and the underdeveloped world, heirarchical subservience/values at work (here of soldiers) but most of all different approaches to life by different people. This mosaic can be enjoyed or rejected by the viewer. Before the studio's and distributors' names appear on screen we see a flame as from a matchstick lighting up the darkness. Much later in the film, the same flame appears before the imprisoned AWOL US soldier (played by Jim Caviezel) has a philosophical verbal sparring with his avuncular superior (played by Sean Penn).

Malick’s film is less about action and more about atmosphere. Early in the film we are shown an alligator slithering into water. Conventional cinema will revert to the reptile’s role in the film within the next five minutes at the most. Malick’s film shows the alligator much later strung-up by soldiers as meat. Malick presents the alligator and soldiers as killing machines, and prods the viewer to review the necessity of killing or eating one another. Visually, the men prove more deadly than the alligator at the end of the film.

Halfway into the film, Malick presents an American soldier extracting gold teeth from dead and dying Japanese soldiers. Much later in the film the American throws the gold into the rain and mud. Asks a captured Japanese soldier to an American: “Are you righteous? Kind? Does your confidence lie in this? Are you loved by all? Know that I was, too. Do you imagine your suffering will be any less because you loved goodness and truth?” Films like The Thin Red Line are unusual to find among the piles of films made in USA.

The Thin Red Line is not about why there should be no wars. It is a film about the genesis of wars and why human beings get embroiled in wars. It is replete with quotations from the Bible, the Bhagvad Gita, the Illiad, and Steinbeck’s novel Grapes of Wrath and presents an argument that individuals are less in control of nature than they think they are. Philosophy and nature are important facets of any Malick film.

Malick has studied the works of philosophers like Wittgenstein and Heidegger. It is, therefore, not unusual that his films always capture the metaphysical aspects of man’s relationship with nature. After making his second film Days of Heaven, Malick took a 20 year sabbatical from movies to watch birds. In between he avoided journalists like plague and then decided to make The Thin Red Line. Interestingly Hollywood had already made an earlier black and white film on the James Jones book. Malick’s version perplexes some but gains admiration of many. Repeated viewings make the film seem more valuable an experience than before. While the book was based on the real action of World War II in the Pacific front, Malick’s film goes beyond the World War. At the start of the film—a question in the voice-over gives a clue to what follows “What’s this war in the heart of nature?”

Nature is the real star of Malick’s films. Those who saw Days of Heaven will never forget the harvesting sequences and the attack by locusts—reminiscent of the finest documentary traditions of Flaherty’s cinema in the 1930s (e.g., Man of Aran). Documentary traditions get interlinked with fiction in Malick’s The Thin Red Line, too. Waves of 5 feet tall green grass camouflage crawling soldiers, where harmless grass snakes appear less fearsome than armed humans. Nature unfolds forth waves of memories and feelings in the soldiers preparing for battle. Says one soldier, “Look at this jungle. Look at those vines, the way they twine around, swallowing everything. Nature’s cruel.” Water, too, plays fascinating roles in Malick’s cinema. In Days of Heaven, the death of the Richard Gere character Bill is captured by placing the camera underwater not merely as a gimmick but suggesting water as a cleansing symbol or a baptismal facet of nature.

Conventions are broken when Malick deals with music. In Malick’s films, music often unleashes verbal comments or drowns sentences that are yet to be completed, quite unlike traditional cinema where music underlines the spoken word or violins stress tragedy. In Malick’s movies music intentionally intrudes into the dialogue. Ennio Morricone (the wizard who contributed to the spaghetti Westerns) in Days of Heaven, and Hans Zimmer in The Thin Red Line provide powerful musical counterpoints to beauty and serenity of the landscapes captured on screen. In Malick’s cinema music is often more profound and moving than the spoken word. Zimmer’s work with Malick has been compared to the works of Shostakovich, the Russian composer.

Malick put together a fascinating ensemble of actors for the film The Thin Red Line, where the individual “disappears in the collective” to quote a critic. Actors like John Travolta, Adrian Brody (Oscar winner for The Pianist), and George Clooney stride the screen for less than a few minutes. Long footages of the film with actors Viggo Mortensen, Billy Bob Thornton, Mickey Rourke were dropped on the editing floor. The director instead chose to give long exposure to Sean Penn and Nick Nolte. Malick propelled the then unknown stars like Jim Caviezel (Passion of the Christ) and Ben Chaplin into significant roles. Caviezel has been quoted as stating that he would have left the acting profession had Malick not picked him for the role. Malick’s reputation have made good actors queue up to work on his projects.

How does The Thin Red Line compare with the other three films directed by Malick? Badlands (1973), I have always felt, was appreciated because it was the closest amongst his four movies to established Hollywood aesthetics. Days of Heaven (1978) was Malick’s major attempt to capture the magic moments of nature and meld them with music and natural sound, coming closer to the early masters of documentary such as Flaherty and even the few magical films made by the French stage wizard Ariane Mnouchkine (of Theatre du Soleil fame) or the German filmmaker Hans Jurgen Syberberg. In The Thin Red Line, I consider Malick attempted and achieved more than his earlier films because of the gravitas of director’s treatment of the subject that rejected conventions of cinema by almost rejecting the importance of predetermined scripts and throwing the established concepts out of the window. Malick broke new ground making some characters in the story more prominent and others less imposing, if not trivial upsetting top notch actors who were promised prominent roles that were eventually discarded by Malick. Malick was underlining his all powerful role as director, scriptwriter and editor. That is why James Jones recedes into the background while the "invisible" Malick plays Svengali to the chosen few actors/characters in the story. Malick apparently discusses the philosophy of the characters with his actors, which goads them to give their memorable best but gets staggering quality output from his cinematographers and composers of music. Unfortunately, his fourth film The New World (2005), though bearing Malick’s stamp of great performances, music, sound and photography could not match the brilliance of his previous two efforts. Meanwhile, I await with anticipation the release of his fifth film Tree of Life later this year.

How I wish I could meet and interact with this "brahmin" among filmmakers alive today!

P.S.: Parts of this post were published earlier by the author in National Review, New Delhi, Vol 2, no.9, in 2004. A review of Malick’s Days of Heaven was published earlier on this blog. A review of Malick's The Tree of Life appears later on this blog, exploring the connections between that film and The Thin Red Line.

89. Chinese director Wang Quan’an’s “Tuya’s marriage” (2006): A wedding that looks back at marriage and life

2009-09-13T08:30:00.000-07:00

The emerging cinema of mainland China offers quite a different whiff of fresh air compared to the new winds of change in cinema that one encounters from Iran, Korea, Spain, Turkey, or Mexico. Filmmakers of China are classified by a particular generation--each generation espousing a particular political and social viewpoint under the watchful eye of Big Brother. The resulting impact of the cinema of each Generation on the filmgoer, of course, is by all accounts distinct. Catching international attention are specifically the Chinese filmmakers that belong to both the Fifth and the Sixth Generations of the Chinese mainland filmmakers (as distinct from the Hong Kong and Taiwanese brand of Chinese cinema), most of whom are products of formal Chinese film institutes. The Fifth Generation filmmakers are associated with the Eighties and the Nineties and their typical cinematic works capture the socio-political configurations that emerged on the heels of the Cultural Revolution in China. Their productions exhibit rich production values, matching the best in Europe and Americas, with unorthodox methods of storytelling. These movies captured the hearts of film-festival enthusiasts, beyond the shores of China. The Sixth Generation of filmmakers, associated with the late Nineties and the current decade, unlike the Fifth Generation, have made their mark by adopting documentary-like approaches to realistic fiction, capturing the social changes of the day while seeming to consciously reject the high quality standards of the Fifth Generation while infusing a streak of individualism. The director of Tuya’s Marriage, Wang Quan’an belongs to this Sixth Generation.

Tuya's Marriage, which won the highest honors (Golden Bear) at the Berlin film festival in 2007 and the Special Jury Prize at the Chicago film festival 2007, was shot in China’s Inner Mongolia autonomous region (which some viewers seem to confuse for the neighboring Mongolia, an independent nation). Director Wang Quan’an (or is it Quan’an Wang?) has done a rare feat in Chinese cinema—making a film that is centered on an individual rather than a group of individuals. Tuya is a woman—a herdswoman taking care of 100 sheep, two children and a husband Bater, crippled while trying to dig a well for his family. Water, we learn, is a scarce resource—Tuya has to travel a great distance on her two humped camel. She is young and attractive but resolute that she has to take care of her family for ever in spite of her tough life. It is important for non-Chinese viewers to note that the state only allows one child per family in China, yet Tuya has two!

Of course, even though Tuya's Marriage centers around one individual Tuya, director Wang has an escape clause that would please the Chinese authorities, if the question were to ever crop up—the principal character is constantly caring for others, kith and kin. For his third feature film, Quan’an ropes in a major collaborator on the project. That person is Lu Wei, who wrote Chen Kaige’s Farewell, My Concubine (Golden Palm winner at Cannes and Golden Globe winner in Hollywood) and Zhang Yimou’s To Live (Cannes winner of the Grand Prize of the Jury). Lu Wei and Wang Quan’an present a tale that might make occidental viewers wonder if such dedication to family life exists today—it’s a tale of a woman who seeks a divorce merely because she loves the family intensely, and hopes she can win a new spouse who will take care of the entire divorced family. It is an amazing love for the family by an individual that is presented by the filmmakers that bewilder the authorities depicted in the film, then the suitors of Tuya, and finally, the audience.

Typical of the Sixth Generation filmmakers, many characters such as Tuya’s crippled husband Bater and Tuva’s neighbor-cum-suitor Senge in the film are local habitants of Inner Mongolia without amy acting experience picked up by the director, quite in line with original neo-realist traditions. In contrast, the lead character of Tuya is played by Yu Nan, a professional actress, who has acted in all the three films made by the director and has won best actress awards for all three performances at three film festivals in succession (the French Deauville Asian film festival for the first, the Paris film festival for the second, and the Chicago film festival for Tuya’s Marriage). It is not surprising that the Wachovsky brothers’ (of Matrix fame) cast her in their recent film Speed Racer (2008).

Any ordinary filmmaker presented with Tuya’s story would probably have opted to end the film with a finite conclusion to the unusual tale. The director and scriptwriter begin and end the film with the scenes of a wedding of Tuya—while the film is specifically about the married life of Tuya. Wang Quan’an ends the film with tears flowing down the face of Tuya. Who are Tuya’s tears for? That is the question the film asks of the viewer. Are they for her divorced crippled husband, who loves so her intensely? Are they for her children constantly getting into trouble? Are they for her true lover that Tuya recognizes at last? Or are the tears for her new husband waiting in another tent to marry Tuya, accepting all her conditions of marriage? Or are the tears for the no-win situation that Tuya finds herself in? The last few minutes of the film remind you of the quiet, soft power of the end of another film: Tony Gilroy's Michael Clayton.

The film succeeds in capturing the Sisyphean existential dilemma of the sensitive and ethical individual eclipsed by society’s demands of different hues. I have subsequently learned that Wang Quan’an’s mother came from the region shown in the film, where economic development is fast displacing the shepherds of Inner Mongolia. I have also learned that the non-professional actor playing the taciturn Bater (who had the best lines to speak in the film) was a herdsman who after doing the role in the film was forced to become a peasant following decisions made by the State. I also learn that the film is made in Mandarin language and not in Mongolian, the language spoken in those parts of China shown in the film, a decision possibly take to help the lead actress who speaks most the meager spoken lines in the film. Much more than spoken words, the film communicates through the documentary feel of the film helped by the German cinematographer Lutz Reitemeier, who has worked with the director on the last two films.

It is indeed difficult to classify Tuya’s marriage. Is it a docudrama? Is it a love story? Or is it an existential query?

P.S. Films of three Fifth Generation filmmakers have been reviewed earlier on this blog--Zhang Yimou's Not one less (1999), Zhang Yang's Getting home (2007), and Gu Changwei's Peacock (2005)--all internationally lauded works of cinema looking at aspects of family values in modern mainland China.

88. Russian director Khuat Akhmetov’s “Chelovek-veter” (Wind Man) (2007): Marquez in Kazakhstan

2009-08-26T10:01:00.000-07:00

Many cinematic memories flashed in my mind as this Russian film, set in Asia, began unspooling. “Wind man” was the nick name of Akira Kurosawa, the great film maestro from Japan. Kurosawa was called the wind man, ever since he made his debut film Sugata Sanshiro/Judo story (1943). It had a powerful end, cinematically capturing the role of the wind as much as the human actions. And one of my favorite movies of this Japanese Wind Man is not a Japanese film but a Russian Oscar winning film called Dersu Uzala (1975), also set in Asian parts of Russia.

Set in the glorious natural expanses of rural Kazakhstan, Khuat Akhmetov’s Wind Man is an obscure Russian film that offers great value both in style and substance. Although I did not spot any reference in the movie’s credits to Nobel Prize winning Colombian author Gabriel Garcia Marquez, the story is evidently adapted from his popular short story called A very old man with enormous wings. Those who have not read Marquez' story would be enthralled by the magic realism that the story/movie offers. Even those who have read the story, would find the Russian film enthralling and try to re-read the Marquez tale (the translation is available free on the Internet) because the film and story are considerably similar at the start and yet so very different towards the end. That is the likely logic for Akhmetov to avoid mentioning Marquez by name in the credits. For me and many others, such films are important not just as cinema but because viewers are driven by curiosity towards the finest writers of this world. Wind Man will remain a fine example of good cinema encouraging people to rediscover the pleasures of the written word.

Akhmetov and co-scriptwriter Odelsha Agishev metamorphose Marquez’ fictional character of a poor Christian fisherman into a marginal Muslim Kazakh villager. The Kazakh ekes out a living raising horses and chickens. Both the fictional characters have a wife and a sick child. Both are visited on a balmy night by an old man with enormous wings who falls down from the skies. However, Akhmetov’s tale ends in a tragic fashion (Russian novelists and filmmakers seem to be at their best with tragedies) while Marquez offers a more spiritually oriented alternative end (in line with the Roman Catholic upbringing of the Colombian rural folks). Both tales offer the reader/viewer many moral perspectives to reflect upon and even have a hearty laugh.

Akhmetov and Agishev are able to transform the tale into satire in many parts of the film, with an old aircraft serving as a “supermarket” that moves around not of its own power but because it is tugged by a land vehicle. If you view the scene critically, you will chuckle at the fact that the words “supermarket” is written in English, not Russian—when not even one character in the village is likely to speak English. There are obvious barbs at Communist era thinking processes of individuals who try to figure out how an old man with wings could be “socially productive” for the commune. The sycophants and imbeciles, with power thrust on them that such societies are likely to produce, are well fleshed out. Corruption in such societies is naturally captured by the filmmakers. One of the corrupt sycophants ends up as an “angel” in a freak show and there is a fine sequence in the film of the two "angels" evaluating each other's predicament.

The movie’s real strength comes from the original Marquez concept—goodness of the strange angelic creature that is no longer young but finds camaraderie in young children and uncorrupted minds of the adults. We are happy to see old angels when they make the sick children healthy. But how do we react after they outlive their immediate social/moral value? The Russian film provides, intentionally or unintentionally, an alternate ending to the Marquez story that fits like a glove for the Muslim mindset—which even adds an imaginary contrapuntal Satanic character Madar, representing death, that never existed in the Marquez story. Ironically, the local Mullah decrees that the winged man is not an angel because the creatures does not speak Allah’s language—Arabic. (Interestingly, even the priest in Marquez’ story writes to the Pope--through proper hierarchical channels--to figure out whether they should call it an angel!)

The movie will open up considerable insights into typical thoughts of the people of Central Asia today with its population often seeking refuge in religion after surviving corrupt political despots of earlier eras. The film cannot be compared to the power of Dersu Uzala. Yet Wind Man is representative of the wide variety of good cinema that Russia continues to produce decade after decade, even though this is the first regular film made by 60-year-old director who had made one TV film prior to this fine feature debut. Akhmetov's trump card for the viewers of Wind Man is the choice of the actor Igor Yasulovich who does not speak a word in the entire film. He reminds you of the latter day thespian Yuri Jarvet (Kozintsev's Lear and Tarkovsky's Dr Snaut in Solyaris/Solaris) of Russian/Estonian cinema, being able to meld respect and aloofness to the strange character he portrays. The only time he makes an audible stamp in the movie is when, under pain of being poked with a red-hot iron, he screams in pain (an event common to both Akhmetov and Marquez versions of the tale) resulting in an unusual storm that is definitely not of man-made proportions.

The Wind Man is no ordinary tale. It forces the viewer to look as politics, social anomalies, religion and humanism. It does not matter whether the Wind Man is an angel or not. It does not matter whether or not children's lives can be saved by extra-terrestrial angelic forces. What the film seems to ask the viewer is to focus on the relationships and values of individuals and families--not far removed from what Marquez intended. Even Mozambican writer Mia Cuoto walked the same road as Marquez and Akhmetov. And cinema brings them closer to us.

P.S. Another example of magic realism in contemporary cinema is the Portuguese/Mozambican film Sleepwalking Land (2007) built on the novel of Mia Cuoto. That film was reviewed earlier on this blog.